I just upgraded my blog site to dasBlog 1.9.  It's been a long time between releases - which is a good thing - but so far I can't see a lot of difference from 1.8.  There are a few new themes and 3 new settings - auto expire comments, html comments & gravatar icons (whatever they are).  There is no support for Comment RSS and the activity reports still only work a day at a time (my biggest complaint).  Still, it's a rock solid product and the upgrade was extremely painless, although my customised theme has broken so I need to do some work on that.