I can assure you the developers haven't forgotten about the mod, and there is a planned update soon. All of the devs on the mod do it in their spare time, all of them have lives, and jobs, etc so they work on it when they can.
Because this mod is being developed by an established team, I doubt there would be an option to hire out work on it to others. I would bet due to legal reasons it needs to continue to be offered as 100% free to play and cost nothing to use. This because it is based on a game that is copyrighted- thus I highly doubt there is any chance of getting money involved with it. Lots of other reasons I can think of behind that, but just doubt money would ever be a part of this.
