Remember, originally it was a Plan Escape mod for NWN that year after year went belly up. Its not surprising that the motivation for it on NWN2 is leeching away considering NWN2 has been no where near the popularity of NWN, at least the online aspect of it - I mean, all the complaints seem to be dying away.
The same thing happened with the DLA team. Year after year of high expectations lead to their team basically headhunted until only two mods got made, and one of them was commercial.
I am surprised CEP got finished and quite frankly I am of the opinion they had outside support. The reason I say this is because it was dead for almost two years and I was personally contacted by a member of the team to receive as many free CD's as I wanted. I got 30. Someone, somewhere had to pay for this and the many other folks that also got the same deal. I'm not saying in the leat I'm not grateful for it, I'm just trying to point out that large projects like this are difficult to sustain. I could be wrong with the CEP, I have no actual evidence.
Mind you, there are fantastic mods of incredible scale out there such as Dark Side of the Sword Coast for BG and of course Counterstrike. Right now I'm playing on Rise of Mankind for Civ4. With Counterstrike, its the mod that made the game I understand. Before it, Half Life was just another shooter.