I oppose closing this project. In fact we have a language subtag precisely so that simple.wikipedia.org can be changed to en-simple.wikipedia.org. And we use such a subtag for Belarusian. And as you say the community is robust and active.
There _is_ an outstanding action to migrate the site to the new designation.
Michael Everson
One thing that both sides agree on is that Simple English content would be better used within Wikipedia if there were closer integration between SEWP and English Wikipedia. There are different ideas as to how to accomplish this, and in particular a big difference of opinion as to whether the connections should be between two independent projects or done as an integration of Simple English content into English Wikipedia. But everyone agrees that something along these lines would be worthwhile.
Putting the en-simple link at the top of the list of languages would raise its visibility.
Michael