I'm all for writing open-source tools, but the real contribution of RPGMaker is surely not its source, but the easy design interface that its creators invented to make RPGs.
Hopefully the EasyRPG folks have some real innovation to pull EasyRPG away from RPGMaker in some nice way, and all that they clone is the file format used.
And in a lot of ways, the audience was always small, even in RPGMaker's prime. To me, that was the biggest setback. If I was going to pour 100+ hours into making a game, I would have wanted people to play it. Preferably, a lot of people, but even some would have been fine. That just never seemed to be a likely possibility.
In theory, this project will make RPGMaker games more easily playable on all platforms, and thus more accessible. So that's a worthy goal. I don't think you'd be able to make modern games on RPGMaker 2000/3. But you could make a respectable, if rustic take on the 16-bit-era RPG. And maybe you could find a small, but passionate userbase for it.
I wouldn't labor with RPGMaker under the assumption that you're building the Next Big Game. But if you're doing it to make passion projects or hobby games? Sure.
That is no longer true, people even make money selling RPGMaker games (e.g. the Aveyond series [1]). RPGMaker(-style) games are an established "casual games" genre these days. You know mostly aiming for the same market and sold at the same sites [2] as Hidden Object, Match-3, etc. games i.e. the audience is mostly female. If you want to try a modern RPGMaker (VX) game I can recommend Skyborn [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aveyond_series
[2] http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/17974/skyborn/ind...
Games like To the Moon and Always Sometimes Monsters have a place, because they don't try to be RPGs (but rather, games just happening to use RPG Maker), but they're few and far between. The "RPG feel" of RPG Maker games pretty much sucks, and there's not a lot you can do to fix that. Skyborn tries, but it still feels-like-an-RPG-Maker-game. I think the future of these is more bespoke titles, like what Zeboyd does (or what I'm--slowly--doing, shameless plug).
They have made money for more than half a decade and new games are released and sold all the time. Dig through the site I linked (Big Fish, which is Steam For Women basically), they have a massive collection with many recent releases. The creator of Aveyond (a truly rare beast: a female game developer!) does not seem to suffer from a lack of business either [1].
>The Aveyond games are crap compared to pretty much any indie game you care to look at
Matter of taste issue. Based on the way you express yourself I guess you are a young male.. you are not the target audience. These games are beloved by their fans.
Seriously, go play the field. I have, because I'm making a JRPG, and I find the field lame as hell. Bad UX (how many menus must you click through to do anything? WHY?), mediocre assets (lots of art is expensive, but good art is manageable), and gameplay that is hindered by--wait for it--being in RPG Maker. RPG Maker in all its incarnations has limited ways to interact with the core mechanics. You can't rip out the worst parts of it. You can't fix it (and this is why the good ones, like To the Moon and Always Sometimes Monsters, treat it as a walk-around visual novel instead of an RPG engine). The ability to avoid these limitations is why EasyRPG may have a chance, but I tend to think the overwhelming sameyness of titles using a limited engine will keep them at very-niche status.
And female game developers are honestly not that rare anymore if you pay attention to the indie scene. Before my latest Twitter purge I probably followed around thirty out of a gamedev list of a hundred and thirty or so. It's cool.
The dev has even made it free (although it’s in Japanese).
The dev’s (えぬ, romanized as 'Enu') website is here: http://rpgex.sakura.ne.jp/home/
The site for the game is here: http://rpgex.sakura.ne.jp/littleworld/index.html
Also, if you’d rather not watch a video, the same person who uploaded the linked video also wrote a review (with screenshots) on their blog: http://otakuoverdrive.com/2014/05/25/game-review-boushi-seka...