I'm one of a few "fluent" speakers of Lojban. I still think that among similar attempts (including controlled English) Lojban is the best option so far.
Yeah, I can say the same about Lojban community. Most Lojbanists study and use Lojban to better know how we think, how can knowledge be better represented. As for other languages a lot of Lojbanists speak several major languages each so this means that Lojban can't be replaced by another major language.
dots represent pauses or glottal stops. what other symbol could be used for it? Apostrophe represent either [h] or "th" like in "thin". Again what other letter could be used?
If you mean particular values of k then modern Lojban isn't compatible with non-infinite lookahead although pragmatically a high value of k may do the trick on real texts. As for SLL I'm no expert, sorry.
https://discord.com/invite/WgFrX8J