Hi Craig,
we are part of the ASPRS LAS working group and of course we will implement the LAS format 1.5 immediate after release.
lasvalidate is something else - it is a quite old open source tool. We
- have some plans to do a full redesign there
So it is not sure how fast we will be with the redesign of lasvalidate.
Btw, lasvalidate is a open source community tool: If someone feels to implement stuff into this tool it is much appreciated by us.
Cheers,
Jochen @rapidlasso