Quite honestly if you play ET at a somewhat "competitive" level, or if you simply want the best performance, your .cfg will be tweaked to the least demanding of values and will generally not make the textures look good. I don't really think ET needs better textures. All it needs is more stability and multi-threading support. I mean, it's very demanding for an 8 year old game, even on newer systems you're not free from lags.

That being said, I think that if the standalone version of ETX manages to gain some popularity, it will be a great game and I will play it for sure. Obviously it would benefit from being developed as a standalone project, imo. It could be something innovative and modern while still being faithful to the key factors that made ET the game we all love. At least that's my view: I don't want an ET overhaul mod, I want a worthy follow-up to it.