Much has changed since the original proposal 4 years ago. The biggest being the large increase of participants and the volume of original content, and I'm in the process of re-deciding what my ultimate goals for nesdev will be.
I'm in agreement of preparing for the master assembly of Action 53, to that end things like engine improvements and merges should be encouraged. If I recall correctly there's a remastered version of Sir Ababol from Mojon Twins. Arbitrary engine merges may not actually save as many bytes as one would hope because the majority of the game size consists of the level layout and graphical data which is not common from game to game. For graphical data, I would be willing to replace pb53 with
donut to help with space there. Also maybe have a few CHR RAM games, that only upload a full CHR sheet on start, move to CHR ROM to easily take advantage of the compression.
My original thoughts of making mini tools that require large saves is not going to work. It is also not a common thing to work on someone else's full game source code. I personally have a couple half finished projects aimed at being in the remix: Solar Wars rewrite,
Russian Roulette rewrite, and implementing the actual correct logic in my musical controller toy. I should finish those.
There's no chance for me to make my own full original game, and that's OK, many of us are already doing that. I willing to spend my efforts to help with the master assembly of Action 53, wether that be through a "remix compo" or just helping assemble it. Maybe Tepples and I should do a mini hackathon the day after
NovaCon 2018 as I will still be in the area that Sunday.