so does this mean we are stuck forever with 1.9.something and the old sdl library? :(
Well, if you want SDL2, you can use pygame_sdl2. ;-)
At the moment, I don't see any advantage to porting the pygame codebase to SDL2, when pygame_sdl2 already exists. It seems like development energy would be better spent improving compatibility, adding features to pygame_sdl2, and helping the two projects to share code. If there's some advantage to making another SDL2 port, we could look at that, but it sounds like a lot of work, so a compelling reason would be needed.
In terms of version numbers, I could see the SDL1.2 based pygame making releases like 1.10, 1.11, and so on. We'd probably avoid making 2.x because of the potential for confusion.