The Neo4j team has made several significant contributions, including the development of a new traversal framework that is now integrated into the kernel and can be explored through the apidocs. The team has also introduced a new event framework, which is documented on the wiki and in the apidocs, and has seen improvements in graph algorithms and indexing capabilities. Additionally, the REST API has been updated to support Java 5 and full text indexing, and JMX support has been added for monitoring purposes. These changes aim to enhance the overall performance and usability of the Neo4j database.