Soooooo... we all know that there is no V2 exploit as of April 2024, but between the release of the V2 switch and today's date, has there been any sort of progress for creating a softmod exploit?
Publicly, no.
That's all we know.
I don't expect to see any news about a new softmod until after the end of the Switch's life cycle.
Exploits are difficult to find on the Switch, and the moment another softmod exploit is released, Nintendo would quickly patch it.
So it makes more sense to save it until the Switch 2 when Nintendo no longer cares about the Switch 1 so it won't get patched and more people can enjoy it.
That is unless a discovered (unannounced) softmod exploit gets patched, then there would be no reason not to release it.
This happened often on Sony consoles (largely due to Sony paying out large bounties for information on exploits with the stipulation that nothing is made public until a certain amount of time afterwards). But Nintendo are not really known for preemptively discovering and patching exploits, they usually wait until one is made public. Generally, they just do the bare minimum to slow down pirates/homebrew enthusiasts. On the plus side, if there is another softmod exploit, Nintendo are unlikely to patch it as long as it's kept secret, so the chances of it still working after Switch EOL if it's kept secret until then are high.
We know certain parts of the exploit chain do work on newer firmwares. Parts of it work up to at least 7.x, meaning an exploit is theoretically easier on firmwares <= 7.x. That would probably not be a very useful firmware to exploit though as I doubt many people still run a firmware below that, it's very old.
But it's not much use without the rest of the exploit chain, and the most difficult part (and the hardest to find a replacement for) did get patched long before 7.x.
No guarantees that an exploit for newer FW will ever be found though. Only that if it does happen, it's likely to be kept secret until Switch EOL.
There is also the fact that once Nintendo moves on from the Switch, the lack of any further system updates will make it possible to analyze the latest firmware update in extreme depth. It's possible someone will discover something that was previously missed, since not having new firmware updates to worry about, or repeatedly analyzing every firmware version in the hopes of finding something, but just be able to focus on the latest (since that should be the main focus at that point), makes the job easier.
I do believe everything gets hacked eventually and latest Switch FW is no exception. Look at how many new 3DS exploits were discovered after 3DS EOL. We already had good exploits for latest FW and the system blown wide open but it didn't stop people continuing to look, and eventually they found stuff and blew it open even wider (something I genuinely didn't think possible)
