I found this message by Marcus Brinkmann on the L4-Hurd mailing list, to be a pretty encouraging sign of the progress that's been made lately.

...I think that this basically concludes the first step of the initial
bootstrap phase. By being able to link a program against glibc, and
by booting all the way up to that programs main() function, we can now
easily explore and develop the system in any way we want.

The dinner is prepared! :)