I hope this goes well. I would love to see a remake that retains the exact same gameplay with more modern graphics. Hopefully all the people who paid for the current in-development version are not left high and dry in terms of updates and bugfixes. I also have heard the rumors that the team was not treated well, and that the game was never really the focus of the company. I think it may have been a side project of on…
I second this. I've used many graphics improvement mods in the past. The good thing is, graphics quality is almost an orthogonal performance factor for the game - it's mostly CPU bound due to physics computation anyway.
What I'd love to see is more realistic FX (flames, particle systems, explosions) and better lightning and shadows. Especially the latter would make other worlds more beautiful.
> I think it may have been a side project of one of the developers on a totally unrelated product (ie. not even a game).
The story goes more-less like this: Squad is a marketing company. One of their employees was burning out and wanted to leave, and they offered him to let him develop his side project if he stays. This side project grew into Kerbal Space Program, and now is the most recognizable product of the company.
As for the more recent news about mistreatment of KSP team, this is a completely separate story (and to this day I'm not really sure how much truth there is to it; back when I hung out on /r/KSP the issue was quite muddy).