Honestly, I've never quite understood the need to 'sanitise' games. Sure, if you want a game with slavery and devalued human life, but want it to be unrealistic, that's fine - JoNT is exactly that, in so many ways - but why take an existing game, and seek to remove bits from it? If you don't want what a game has, and are capable of writing a game, then write a new one - don't say you'll 'update' the existing one, but only if you can take a bunch of elements out of it which are core to the story and the world. That's always struck me as an odd thing to want to do, but I've seen it happen more than a few times before.
Does a slave-training game *need* lolis and gore? No, of course not - but JoNT has them, and they are part of its DNA (especially certain parts of the gore - Eternal Rome would starve without its meat!). I think, if someone wanted to write a game in Eternal Rome with a different tone to it, that is certainly do-able - but it should not claim to be JoNT.
Of course, I totally understand the fear many people have of being associated with loli, gore, or other extreme or taboo content (like slavery, lol) - but then why volunteer to remake a game that has those elements?
Just my tupence-worth, though - understanding people and their motivations was never really my best quality