Hey Chi,
This is not possible for several reasons. Modding (especially for something like EaW) is very different from creation a game from scratch. It would require a new engine, and several positions that none of us can actually fill. For example, modding Empire at War doesn't require any programming knowledge whatsoever; i's largely really basic scripting, with the most complicated part of it beingf LUA Scripts. This would be true of multiple positions.
There is also the time commitment that you mentioned. With Empire at War and Sins of a Solar Empire, whatever their faults, the foundation is all there and we're just building on what already exists. To make a full fledged game you'd havew to take the 2-3 years or so it would normally take to make a mod the size of ICW, and then add several more years of just building the infrastructure in the engine to get it to a point where the kind of work we've done for ICW could even start, not to mention all the time to learn the extra skillsets required to do it. Modding is only our hobby, we have our own social lives, school and work to worry about.
There's another issue of cost and liscensing. Most of the indie games that are worth anything cost money, and there's a really good reason for this; there's a huge time commitment, yes, but there's also development costs associated. You need to pay for licensing for the engine usually, you need to pay for equipment, and in a lot of cases you need to pay to hire a larger team. I am by no means rich, and the normal means indie developers would use to ay for these would be some form of income (donations, kickstarted pages, and revenue from sales or merch) which we legally cannot do as long as we're using the Star Wars intellectual property. We'd get shut down and sued.
So, thanks for the compliments, however your suggestion is, unfortunately, impossible.