Recently there was a discussion on this in Pd's mailing list and IOhannes said that the main maintainer of Pd-extended is busy with stuff that brings income, at the moment. Not sure when it will be updated.
As for Gem, it's rather easy to compile it and use it with vanilla. I had problems with zexy as OS X command line tools don't include aclocal which is in zexy's configure script (or some other script...), but I copied the libraries from extended's extra directory to /Library/Pd and set the path in Pd's preferences.
I am lately using vanilla with lots of externals, either by compiling them or copying them from extended..