Technically, it should be possible to create a convincing updated using Bethsoft's engine du jour; e.g. the one used in FO4 would achieve the same goals, broadly speaking. My own modding of Ego Draconis/DKS is limited to altering in-game models and textures and I've never progressed to attempting to change any elements of gameplay, but I ported stuff from Bethsoft's Gamebryo with comparatively little effort, just wrenching it about a bit to integrate with different model shapes (e.g. with armour and what-not). The only painful things were creating low-poly models in the same way as required by Dragon Age Oranges and integrating them into the ED/DKS archives but neither would be necessary using a newer engine.
The main issue I foresee is that I don't recall offhand what's the copyright status of the game's assets, which is likely to be the stumbling block given that it was done under the auspices of a different publisher (and is what ultimately caused Larian to become an indie developer). IIRC (and I'd need to check) the green-light was given to port models to other Divinity games but that was as far as it went. I could try to obtain clarification although given that everyone's busy with the impending BG3 release I suspect any sort of definitive answer wouldn't be realistic before the end of the year if it involves anyone having to research it. It also remains to be seen what will happen next with the DKS branch of the Divinity saga, which could have an impact either way; I'd like to be optimistic that means the project would be seen positively given that Larian have definitely embraced modding, but tbh I have no idea.
It's a pity the modding tools aren't available but I suspect the same applies as with Bethsoft's Construction Set/GECK/Creation Kit, which is there's a lot of (very expensive) proprietary software included with restrictive licensing terms which would need to be stripped out in order to distribute, something which would probably be an enormous amount of effort to accomplish.
Personally, I'd love to see DKS remade using a modern engine, especially something that is fully moddable; one can never have too much experience of Broken Valley! It'd be an extremely ambitious project and I've seen enough of them fall by the wayside, but they can succeed: one good example is the effort to remake Cyrodiil in Skyrim (the Beyond Skyrim project... I'll dig a link out later if anyone's interested) which, though a contemporary setting to the events in Skyrim, really feels like you're back playing Oblivion again. Which I feel is relevant as ED itself felt so similar overall to Oblivion what with using a very closely-related engine.
I'm probably not in a fit state to contribute much but I will certainly watch with interest. Oh, and my programming tends to just be in C: learnt it over 35 years ago, don't see the need to change now! :p
