Well, part of the problem there (and part of the reason I and some others continue to use VS) is that the VS Bounty Module was actually three different components:
- The unique bounty system, which was subsumed and upgraded by MagicLib
- The pirate bounty replacer, which effectively allows polities to place bounties on each other when hostile to one another, which always felt a little more verisimilitudinous to me, particularly in the context of Nexerelin also being enabled.
- The bounty-placed-on-player system, which also helped the world feel a bit more lived-in.
Only the first of those has really been replicated. The other two remain unique features to VS (so far as I'm aware), and thankfully they at least still work.
Resurrecting the mod will almost certainly be a real big pain (lord knows I haven't had the guts to try), but losing VS to slow decay is going to be seriously frustrating. It always did so much more than "unique bounties", and if VS is going to be left to rot, it'd be nice to see other mods take up the mantle of a lot of its features.