The Lithium folks (nate & gwoo in particular) split off from the Cake core team. There was some contention but generally speaking I think everyone is still friends. As for lithium being the successor to cake 1.3... well certainly nate & gwoo feel that way, that's why they built it. :) And certainly phpnut & mark_story don't feel that way, that's why they are still driving forward with cake 2.0. Anyway they are both cool projects but I was reacting strongly to your assertion that cake is "no longer maintained", which is as accurate as saying RoR is no longer maintained and has been officially superseded by Node+Express.
I am interested in hearing skrebbel's response to this question however (what makes cake so horrible).