I admire what both Sikorsky and EC have done with their respective compound demonstrators. I especially like that the efforts were privately funded. Both efforts had modest budgets and short schedules (at least by current standards), yet they both performed extremely well in testing.
EC withdrew their proposal for the JMR phase I contract. But that does not necessarily mean they've abandoned efforts aimed at FVL. EC has adequate financial resources to develop a JMR-type flight demonstrator on their own, and doing so would allow them to work in private.