While I've never looked at the EQ client's source or anything, I think it's safe to say that writing the client from scratch would be a massive undertaking. Re-writing the client would be orders of magnitude harder than re-writing the EQ server (which is more or less what P99 has done), and I'm sure even that wasn't easy.
Maybe if you could leverage an existing 3d engine it might be doable by a small (very motivated) team, but I'm not even sure of that.
All that being said, a completely fresh client would be pretty cool though ...
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