In fact, here are two questions that I asked myself most recently, one in the title and one in the content. The question in the title seems rather rhetorical. He expresses a conditional answer to the real question that you will find at the end of the text: "I'm really upset. Is there no way for beginners to get into OSGI?"
Answer: There are ways, but they are not as simple as they should be. The “update” to the question mentions “OSGi in Action”. This is a good book (which I discovered too late, not at the very top of the search results), but quite outdated in terms of tools (for example, Bndtools appears only in the application).
Finding an easy way for beginners, I eventually began to delve into this topic using an eclectic collection of resources found on the Internet. I have documented my experience in what you can call a journal of my (current) journey in the hope that it can be useful to others. I will leave it to you to judge whether this can be considered a shy yes to the question. Finally.
Not having reached the “end of my journey”, I'm not quite sure why there are so few resources for beginners to get into OSGi. I believe that the attention that OSGi received from many people because it was used in Eclipse was one of the first problems. The attempt of the OSGi alliance to combine with the capabilities of the corporate release was different (there are links for this, but I am not allowed to post more than two links). Both incidents led to deception (and many articles), and then to disappointment. In subsequent years, experts better understood this technology and successfully applied it to problem areas where it is used. (And this is less than the intended initial advertisement - or different, OSGi may attract some attention using IoT.) But, as is often the case in such cases, experts (now) have never been tempted to write the kind of introduction that you find during the phases new technology.
Which brings me back to the question from the title, after all: "Is there a new standard?" (which implies whether it is worth wasting time searching in OSGi). The answer depends on which aspects of OSGi are important to you. The JigSaw project aims to introduce modules to the Java platform and developers. With the scheduled date of March 2017 for the central JSR 376, I would say that this can be called the “upcoming standard” (provided that it is completed). But OSGi is more than just modules. Other key features are dynamic configuration (I don't see any competing standard for this feature) and microservices (be careful with this term, it seems they currently have two different interpretations). In the end, you need to take a little look at OSGi to determine its usefulness for your project.