Here's the story all about how this mod got flip turned upside down..
After we released the alpha, things were looking good, until I started having some health related issues and thus wasn't able to manage the mod very well for some months, and the guy responsible for the programming started getting all crazy about getting it out before UT3 because he believed nobody would play UT2004 anymore (to which I say HA! in retrospect) .. we all tried to say that we preferred to take the time to do it right, we wanted it to basically be UT with a new coat, same maps same characters.. and maybe even improve on the detail of UT2004 a little.. you know... something to impress people.
Well this guy just wouldn't have it, and every once in a while he'd pop up with a new codebase, eventually it was less UTR and more CDOM4 with his additions and parts of other mods and his crappy models and ut2004 remakes of maps.. he completely messed up the mod architecture so that it would be compatible with a "compact" version of UTR which was essentially a set of mutators or something.. and kept threatening to release it publicly. Anyway it came to the point where I said look, we've had enough of these stupid threats, you have a choice, you can make the changes we need to bring this back in the right direction and go along with what we want to do with UTR, or you can leave.. I think you can fill in the rest.
Afterwards we found that it would be a huge bitch to undo a lot of the crap he did, we would have had to more or less start over from where the alpha left off. The fact that we didn't have any fresh talent coming to the team also meant that if I wasn't doing anything on it, it was at a standstill. I really lost any desire to continue it and although we have attempted to get the ball rolling again once last year I have serious reservations about investing that kind of time into it anymore.
It's unfortunate but I think the time has passed for this sort of thing. UT2004 might still have potential as a platform for it, and nobody really has any clue what will happen with UT3 at this point. In fact I think there's a pretty big question mark over the entire Unreal franchise.
It is bitter sweet that we were able to get at least one release out with some success, I guess that is something. The lesson I've learned is that "remaking UT" is a concept people are going to all see differently and it's not going to be pretty. It's different when it's someone else intellectual property.. really it almost becomes a job that you don't even get paid for. So.. maybe someone will continue it, they're free to do so, I'd love to if I had all the time in the world, but I don't. And if not, then it is what it is.