But isn't there some niche GS3d could focus on? It is not a bad engine (see Quad's example for the potential), it just needs some love.

Just purely speculating, but if the kickstarter goal would be something like 200.000 euro/$. Let's say 50% goes to taxes and other costs, so you keep 100.000 which would mean that JCL could appoint about 3 fte (/3 full time workers) for 1 year on the engine. Which would be enough time to finish some major things right?

Even better, for things like editors and some plugins etc. he could let the community do the bulk of the work through some contests where winners could get some reward as cash and/or licenses. This would save him lots of time and would be interesting for some community members, I quess if the rewards is enough?

That being all said, even getting 200.000 is not easy peasy. So there needs to be a good focus on a niche group (which could still be fairly large just as long it does not compete to much with engines like unity and unreal4). In order know that we need to look at the strengths of GS3d, perhaps being able to run on older rigs? Stable? Other more experienced here with the engine are better at answering this than me.