What's the Point of Modding FF6 on Different Platforms?

But doesn't it seem silly to you to do all this work to change all the sprites to a version that is 20 years old and looks bad to 95% of gamers, just so it's not the even worse version that it is now?  That is some serious long-term dedication to unlocking the modding potential of a retro-RPG

Dedication yes, but a lot faster process than starting from scratch since the embed ROM is use for most of the data and the exe can be disassembled in one click (literally).

What I mean is, for the game to be really playable by more than 5% of gamers, I think this game would have to have modern looking sprites that actually look great--so reverting the sprites backwards is just extra work to go back to the foundation of a 20 year old game that is already more easily mod-able.

I think aside of character sprites the rest look gorgeous. Tilesets are great, animation too, monsters as well. Downgrading the sprite was faster than spriting new ones from scratch, in any way the second avenue is already started by some spriters and both avenues look better than the default PC character sprites. I don't understand why you see the PC version as being such ugly.