Haven't posted an update in a while so I want to let you know that this isn't dead and talk a bit about what is going on and what the plans for the near future are.
The GUI replacement is still going on. It's going way slower than I want it to go and honestly the main reason for that is that isn't fun. If I learned something from this it's that you don't change the whole gui layer of a large software project. It sucks plain and simple.
The good news is that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I'd say the only missing must have features as of now is military, trading, neighbors and profession creation but the normal basebuilding part is fully playable again. I just updated the ui_rewrite branch on Steam so you can see the direction this is going. That branch also has a few performance improvements and bug fixes. Please check it out and let me know what you think. ( the u and z key changes scaling, yes this will be a slider in the settings later)
Other than that I'm seriously entertaining the idea of going open source later this year. When the UI is back in a playable state I think we have a solid foundation for an open source project. More on this in a couple of months.
So as always thanks for your support and patience.