Am impressed you know about the RONI! It's on the CPC webpage, but a touch hard to find.  But you're right that it's lagging the ONI pretty strongly and it very well could be why the tropical atmospheric response has been lagging so far this summer.  Eventually I do think this event will strengthen to a point where it's clear in both ONI and RONI, but that may be a few months off.  Currently, several of us at NOAA are collaborating with folks at the BOM in Australia on a project to further explore RONI in operations... so maybe we'll see it more in the future.