Speakers: Anything really new under the sun?

Personally I would not upgrade them.
(It seems to be at best a minor sideways swap. There is no evidence that much has changed other than inflation.

For example, my 80s speakers were ~ $800, and are now $5650… and while they are on their 7th or 8th iteration, I think it would be more like the 10, 20 or the 40 k$ range to see a super obvious upwards change.)

If you like DSP, then you could go with powered speakers, or add a DSP.

I would look at some modest room treatment… and probably that would be after getting REW and microphone like a UMIK.

If you are going to upgrade passive speakers, then I suspect it is going to take more $2000. Hence; I would just suggest that you love them for what they are.

Getting active speakers removes the need for the amp, so selling the amp and speakers and going active, seems like another reasonable approach… but that will gobble up 2x-4x, of your 2k$ upgrade plan.
(Maybe you could get 1k for the speakers and amp.)

Check out the new PS Audio speakers. You can find some great videos on ayouTube to see them in action at folks homes and hear PS Audiobtalk about them. Very interesting and new. Revel make some great more affordable speakers.  You can get them from Crutchfueld 

The first commercially available speaker using DSP came out in 1991.  Change in the speaker industry over the last 20 years has been more evolutionary than revolutionary.  However, the pace has increased due to increased capacity for modelling and evaluation of ideas, and the rapidly increasing rate at which knowledge spreads.

However, if the question is about the history of Monitor Audio, here's their version of it: https://www.monitoraudio.com/en/about-us/timeline/.  A lot of it is model introductions, but there are plenty of references to incorporation of new (to MA) technologies.

You can get very good speakers for not a lot of money

....wharfedale comes to mind. 

The mass production of neodymium magnets has allowed some worthwhile improvements in driver design.

Borresen Acoustics has done some interesting work in lowering the inductance of its bass/mid unit through the elimination of iron.

That's just two examples of "under the surface" progress in loudspeaker design.

The Manger and MBL drive units are innovative.

In general audio is no different to most other industries in that the majority of progress comes from incremental improvement. The internal combustion engine is a good example - most of the conceptual work was done in the early twentieth century - lead by aircraft engines. However, advances in electronics, materials science and precision engineering have allowed significant improvements in performance, fuel economy, emissions control and durability. Even the electrification of cars is only taking a well established core technology.