It's a new season, and 1.11 might be around the corner at some point, but it wouldn't be a bad thing to get 1.10 support if possible.

I wouldn't mind having polar bear spawner? is that a thing? Or one as a pet.

There are a few new blocks (void, bone, nether, etc), would be fun to try building with those.

Will we see NT on 1.10, (it's been a while, it's fair to ask), or are skipping to 1.11 perhaps?

As you might have noticed 1.11 is planned for release on the 14th of November (http://mojang.com/2016/11/minecraft-111-pre-release-1/), so it's almost impossible that we'll be updating to 1.10 before then. When we do get round to updating it's likely we'll just move on to 1.11 though yeah. Going on what Mojang have said about the frequency of updates though we might have to delay it further as apparently all updates until 1.14 are going to be smaller and more frequent (https://twitter.com/seargedp/status/738398048062218244).

As for why we haven't managed to get onto 1.9/1.10 already; we're currently waiting on a specific piece of third-party software to upgrade to a stable version before I can update all of the custom plugins we use. I can't really give an estimate of when that might be done, but once it is then one of the primary focuses we'll have is to upgrade. The changeover from 1.8 to 1.9 is a massive change for Noobstown because of the addition of the second hand in Minecraft which alters the way we deal with pretty much all interactions on the server; most stuff will need adjusting in some way.

You need to be aware though that from the time of the first upgrade of a certain plugin then no further changes can be made to that system without me going back and merging the changes; it's likely all other changes will have to be put on hold once I begin to update the plugins because it makes little sense to maintain copies specific to each version and to produce features for 1.8 which might need rewriting for the upgrade anyway.

Hopefully that goes someway to explaining the situation we're in; we'll be updating as soon as we can, and now yes it's looking very likely that we'll be going straight to 1.11 rather than 1.9 or 1.10.

Dunno.  I'm probably in the minority, but I'm not fond of the changes to combat in 1.9....I'm just as happy to play in 1.8 a bit longer, even without the new blocks.