the motivation to do an emu should not to have a (full) 8.1 server, a 6.1/7.1 server without bugs is enough to be a goal (but if you have many devs, it could be possible to have a 8.1 full server within a year (or 2 years), but these devs have to have free time to do that)
i already begun a client, but unfortunately i don't have the time now to do something like that (work takes too much time

)
(and if one day the emu is finished, devs will have to maintain and update it then, all that works should belong to a company like ... gala ? although they seems to have difficulty to maintain and add features to their codebase)