ecchi-san is prob never gonna come back. He walked away from any projects related to Alice Awakening a while ago. He started making his own game which was very similar to Alice Awakening, however he never finished it, and vanished. Hentaku invited him to work on the remake, however, for whatever reason, it seems he wants nothing to do with the project.
And to say we have "nothing to show for it" is fairly harsh and incorrect when you realize that the small team working on the remake is under a lot of pressure to even get anything that resembles the original game out with such a small budget, not to mention make it better. You're talking like 3k is a lot of money. They have posted a fair amount of updates, showing the development process.