Well, it is a big change but the guy did say that he would stick around and debug it. Now he's not around anymore.. but we still have his branch, I think, and maybe other programmers who would be interested in implementing it.
I think he just came up with his suggestion too early in the openxcom project, when there wasn't many active forks of the master (like oxce and oxce+ and now xtendo's oxce+adv) and people were mostly concerned with getting a remake of the original rat her than all the total conversions we see.
Nowadays, I think we can find a fork where it would fit, if someone wants to take it on.