You clearly misunderstood rypel's post. He's saying there isn't an active dev team remaining really. The ones that are around are busy and burnt out. If people want to form a team to work on a project like what you suggest, there's nothing stopping them. RenX source code and most assets are available to everyone. Anyone could start a project like that and I doubt "totem arts" would care.
The fact is there's only like 3 coders, 1 mapper, and havoc left. All of those are busy and unmotivated. RenX is far from dead, it just survives by the community. See all the people who have stepped up and done cool things. Ruud, smitzenberg (butchered the spelling, doctorb0ngalongadingdong, henk, thommy, etc. There's nothing stopping you from starting this project that you seem to want. The entire idea is for the community to carry on renx as there is no real active dev team. Yosh56 who did a tonnn of work on the recent patches and auto patching was just a community member who starting coding stuff.