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There are elements of the AI that take away from gameplay (such as their inability to shoot at enemies from the correct range, their tendency to 'shut down' if the map is too active, or their love of running straight into dynamite in search of the perfect rubble to sweep). But then there are some elements that mostly just add some personality to the raiders (their random deviations when moving towards a task that can lead to them running on walls or through otherwise ordinarily unpathable areas, the way that the hungrier they are, the more groggy and even unresponsive they get until they are able to fill their stomachs back up with sandwiches, or the way they are hindered by harmless NPCs like bats and spiders). Perhaps I am alone in this, but I feel that the latter examples are a part of what makes the original raider AI so much fun; unlike the units in a typical RTS which respond perfectly and instantly to 100% of your commands, the raiders in rock raiders act like they are just following orders to the best of their abilities, which leads to the player having to adapt to the sometimes unexpected ways that the raiders respond to the player's inputs. I just don't think a remake would be complete without re-introducing these mechanics in a somewhat less game breaking, but still fun and unpredictable way.

It's difficult to stay motivated when working on a fan-remake of a game, due to the fact that doing so requires a large time commitment and effort for something that cannot make any money, and may well be shut down by the copyright holder, invalidating a tremendous amount of hard work. This is a very common issue surrounding game fan-bases in general honestly. I think the only reasonable solution is to gather enough talent in one place that work on a remake or successor can be divided into a more manageable amount for each developer, but that is obviously much easier said than done, especially for a very underappreciated game like Rock Raiders. The good news though is that Rock Raiders is not a particularly complex game by modern standards, it just becomes tricky trying to make sense of some of the weirder level file data, and attempting to replicate the clunky yet charming Raider AI (and don't forget trying to make sense of your own practically unreadable code )