That’s correct that you can set parameters globally with rhoptions, but often you want to set job-specific parameters, in which case we really do need to make sure the control option is available to every method that kicks off an M/R job. I’ve updated makeExtractable accordingly. You can install from github (this change is not yet on CRAN).
As for the status of Tessera, the project is alive and in use daily. Last month datadr and trelliscope were added to CRAN. We are a bit low on developer resources at the moment, with a lot of resources dedicated to theory and application, while I have been tied up with a lot of travel / consulting work. Also, we are rewriting a lot of the internals of Trelliscope and writing a new Trelliscope viewer from scratch that will have a lot of nice features - a lot to juggle while keeping documentation / etc. up to date. We welcome any contributions from the community :).
Ryan