If you have any idea of the game you want to make, you can even jury-rig an inappropriate choice into something serviceable, if not great. That's been the entire deceit surrounding this project from day one. CIG surrounded itself with a cloud of misused industry terms and marketing fluff, and the fact that Chris Roberts doesn't know how to make a game was glossed over entirely, although the pieces of that puzzle can be found scattered all over their own website.
Someone could probably write a series of blogs identifying any facet of this project and explain how it's a dead end - from the engine, to the scope, to the money, etc. But even if you fixed every individual problem, the game was simply never going to get made, because the guy in charge can't do it, and won't let the people who can do it go about their jobs.