I think breaking away from the SOE client is a great idea. As far as I'm concerned EQEmu is the most successful open source MMO project in existence and it's really only half of it.
I've done some very early work on just authenticating to the eqemulogin server provided with the source. So far it's just an environment and some packet captures. I have to get more familiar with the packet stream and existing packet type identifiers before I can do much more, but I really think that the network side is the better starting point.
The visual portion is probably the easiest part. Content creation is tougher, but at that point I think there would be a tremendous amount of motivation just for being so close to an alternative client, we could even check places like opengameart.org for those interested in making open assets.
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