All this is great, but does it make sense from a business perspective? How many man years do you think it will take to recreate PS? Maybe 100 at a cost of $250,000 per man year. Do you really think Adobe would recoup this cost? I don't....so it won't happen.
If it was easy, we would have seen some competitor step up to the plate, but none has...
The proposition goes far beyond "recreat(ing) photoshop" of course. The same architecture could be deployed in the video/motion picture industry as well, and beyond, into interactive media.
For Adobe itself, recouping the cost would be the least of their worries; the amount of money in their market goes far beyond the expense of new development. Think of what people are paying now just for their CC subscriptions every year. At some point Adobe has to think about how they are going to keep the market for the next 20+ years. There are at least a couple of strategies -- invest in a new architecture that would decisively dominate, or continue to bet on their ability to dominate the market through aggressive business practices and extraction of fees from their customer base month-to-month.
Pragmatically, I don't think they can afford to do either one to the exclusion of the other.
The difficulty I think has more to do with corporate culture than whether the project has a solid business justification. And that is why I said, a few messages ago, that aggressive marketing of this aging product line is standing in the way of real innovation. I wouldn't doubt that there are innovative forces within Adobe, but that, to put it mildly, the culture is conflicted. It is inevitable that market pressure will catch up with them at some point.