Right, if it was unmaintained (which I could easily believe it was!) I wouldn't be at all unsurprised by it being a multi-year effort to get it working again with all the big changes made to OS X in the time period.

And things that were rewritten from scratch for Aqua (in 10.0, like the entire graphics stack) will have never run on a little-endian system, and those alone would be a major porting effort.