This is a really good writeup and I really appreciate the bit at the end about pull requests and issues as I do feel that developers should stay on top of their communities. That said, I like the mixin syntax of Less better and my favorite project Bootstrap uses Less, so I'll stick with Less.
Agreed on the syntax, but for me the bigger issue that keeps me with LESS is that I have no interest in using a Ruby project for something integral to my build process because then I can't hack at it without a bottle of antacid. I don't work in Ruby and I have a strong desire not to; on the other hand, while I don't claim to like it, I'm quite comfortable with JavaScript and can work with LESS's code if I need to (and it has come up in the past).
This is one the reasons Hampton Catlin (the original author of Sass) created libsass, a port of Sass to C for portability. Check it out: https://github.com/hcatlin/libsass
After some brief testing: definitely. Faster than LESS by a good bit, too.
I'm not sure I'm going to use it, because of the compiled dependency (I'm on a Scala/Vert.x stack and I like being able to just check it out and hit "go"), but it's at least a practical option for me and I'm glad it exists.
Did you actually read my post before replying? I much prefer to be able to, if necessary, work with the tools in my build process at a code level. I don't enjoy working with tools I don't have mastery over wherever possible (pgsql is a stretch, but I can hack on nginx, Play, LESS, and Redis without much difficulty).
I have on occasion had reasons to be mucking around in the LESS codebase. I cannot do that with SASS (well, I could, but I'd have to use Ruby and that's a non-starter for me).