The recent developments on the consistency of NF bring welcome closure to the longstanding open question about whether NF was consistent. And this is naturally a very important matter for those who find NF set theory attractive.
To my way of thinking, however, NF was never competitive in providing an attractive account of set theory, and the consistency question doesn't really change this. From what I can see, NF set theory is not based on expressing fundamental truths of a coherent conception of the nature of set, as in the case of Zermelo's theory, but rather arises by a formal limitation of the axioms of an earlier naive (and easily-proved wrong) set theory so as to avoid a known proof of inconsistency.
I see NF as arising by a process of formal fiddling with the axioms, rather than a mathematical idea, and in my view this is not a sound method of finding robust meaningful mathematical foundations. One doesn't reliably arrive at important or even interesting principles of set theory by fiddling with formal details like that.
The NF consistency question was open so long in large part because nobody had a coherent idea of what the theory was supposed to be about. There was little reason to think it was consistent or inconsistent, and the fact that it turns out to be consistent is something that seems to be a lucky accident. I believe that it has little to do with our ideas about sets.
Some philosophers of set theory sometimes express the view that the (inconsistent) general comprehension principle expresses something important, and they regret that it was shown inconsistent by Russell, seeking instead to save it somehow. This is what NF aims at. This is also what paraconsistent set theory aims at.
My view, however, is that the general comprehension principle is simply a logical fallacy, one that is very easily shown to be false. It is wrong, and trivially so, and there is nothing there that needs to be "saved." General comprehension is like denying the antecedant—intuitively plausible for those who first consider it, but ultimately wrong as a logical principle for trivial reasons. We don't mount huge foundational efforts to "save" the principle of denying the antecedent, and I don't see any reason to mount similar efforts to save the easily-proved-wrong principle of general comprehension, including the versions of it in NF.
Meanwhile, the Zermelo theory is amply justified by the picture of sets arising in a vast cumulative hierarchy. We may begin with some urelements, or none since they are not actually need for any purpose, and then form sets of them, and sets of these sets, and so on transfinitely. This picture of the set-theoretic universe leads easily to the Zermelo-Fraenkel theory, while incidently providing no support whatsoever for the general comprehension principle. Also, it provides no support for the kind of sets that you describe outside the well-founded framework.