I don't know if Skyoblivion ever managed to write a robust solution for translating the codebase from the old scripting language to Papyrus, and I can see why it might be a huge hurdle for modding teams.
There is a similar project redoing New Vegas in Fallout 4 (F4NV - I'm not affiliated with the project, just a fan snooping on their progress from time to time) and one of the really important things is that they're making their vision of what NV could be. This means all new meshes, textures, and code - not the old content updated to run on the new engine.
I've written some code for fiddling around with the plugins the engine uses (.esp/.esm/.esl files). The basic structure hasn't changed, but a lot of the records and fields have. Automatically converting them well enough to not need manual tidying up would be a pretty arduous task.
Converting the old code into papyrus would be as well.