I'd be interested just how many OSRS players had never played RuneScape prior to trying OSRS; certainly at least a few on account of OSRS Gold the simple fact that it's become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon/icon but it can not be very many. I envision curiosity about a 13 year really grind-heavy, mostly obsolete old MMORPG running on a 20 year old spaghetti powered motor is not quite high among audiences that didn't grow up playing RuneScape to start with. Some sort of RuneScape Remastered or MMO set in the RuneScape world might be RuneScape's only real hope. You're completely correct about Jagex's dreadful handling of every other game they've ever made, so I'm hardly optimistic.
Look at steam amounts, or player counts games such as cod. Runescape generally has at least 20kish players online. Thats 24/7 games fantasy of numbers like that. Just the most successful games have players. Can it be less than it'd sure, is it close to death? Not even near it. If you produce a game now you expect is has even a fraction of the players. Look at wolcen, they had like players on the first day and they didn't even imagine or prepare for that many gamers so the servers took a shit. Today Runescape averages less than 2k gamers.
Such as they used to in the rpg and mmo side of this market there are to many games now days for matches to support huge numbers. RS3 has a good 20-30k on much at any time. With upward of like 45k at peaks. It'd be to low 20's on steam charts in rank if we are comparing to steam charts. Which is really a really good spot to be in contemplating that's where a lot of the games place on steam graphs such as ESO and fantasy.
My guess is that it's likely to be an entirely new and different MMO instead of remastering the very old code we play now, I don't think they think it's worth to remaster RuneScape in dread of it being unsuccessful and result in loss of gamers. On the other hand, brand recognition is potentially the best marketing tool there is, particularly when it's one using the amount of nostalgia which Runescape brings to many people. The rumours of RuneScape: Remastered are that it's a completely new game which shares some lore out of RuneScape, but could be put a bit later in the deadline and have an entirely new world (maybe sharing some of the very same places as the current RuneScape, but rebuilt from the ground up without the grid and other limitations of the engine).
So it basically is a wholly brand new MMO, but they are using RuneScape more as a franchise than to refer to buy RS gold a particular game (or two matches, I guess). It's probably only called"RuneScape Remastered" for marketing purposes. There are a slew of those who played with RuneScape at some point in their lives, but are following the news around Jagex anymore. If they launch a game called"RuneScape Remastered" that they will probably get much more traction on the internet than when they would launch a completely distinct MMO with a very different title.