Quote from Baron:
The idea was never dropped. As soon as I implemented the software with the self-moderation capabilities, people were instantly crying for the "old ET" to come back because of some lost posts and other migration problems. You have to understand that moving to an entirely new model of moderating user's own threads and the implementation of other requested advanced features are not "bolt-on mods". This means that almost all of the old underlying code has to change, and virtually nothing is going to behave in the exact same way as it used to. It's going to be a clusterfuck of changes no matter how you look at it. It's like building a brand new interstate without any inconveniences to existing drivers and roads... it's just never going to happen. So change is coming, but I can tell you right now that it's not going to be pretty.