Probably yes. I wondered this myself when I heard about this reengineering project which I agree needs to be done after delving into the vim source before.

However the time to market before it was even slightly usable would be rather large I imagine. I wrote a very basic clone of "ed" in Z80 assembly back in the 90s and it took me nearly 6 months before I trusted it with a file that wasn't disposable.

Perhaps there should be two projects starting at each end of the problem and see which one wins.