It is like tossing water out of a leaky boat. And the boat keeps sinking.
If I had the talent, I'd love to put an open world game in CryEngine or UnrealEngine (like Tera did).
Noone has the talent to do it *on their own*. I do think though that if the mod community for Elder Scrolls was able to organise itself, there would be easily enough talent available to make a state of the art sandbox engine from scratch based on some modern graphics toolkit, provided that some kind of project management could be agreed on. That's a big proviso though. What Elder Scrolls provides is a very large base of lore and gameplay decisions that would probably be almost impossible to agree over a fragmented community - at least without a gaming equivalent of Linus Torvalds.
Hey and when you get it started - let me know will you!