Here's Design Mechanism's statement:
http://designmechanism.freeforums.org/chaosium-design-mechanism-and-runequest-statement-t1220.html
I don't understand enough of the relationships between these games to really get the nuances!
This is good news. Thanks for the FYI !!
And yeah , it's complicated. The first Mongoose RQ (RQ4) was a mess. MRQ2 (RQ5) was an improvement and had promise but dropped the ball in some areas, and was pretty incomplete. Then the two guys who wrote MRQ2 started TDM, and came out with RQ6...IMO, overburdened with subsystems and complication as they tried to really put thier own stamp on the RQ name. They later released a "essentials" stripped down version of RQ6, which was an improvement.
Now it seems we will see a system that is more akin to their "essentials" product, written with Glorantha in mind, which is how RQ was orginally published by Chaosium back in 1978...a FRPG specifically designed for Glorantha, not the "generic" system it became in 1984 when Avalon Hill published it, and the later MRQ and RQ6 design. Runequest has a pretty split fanbase....There are the original folks like myself who see it specifically as the Gloranthan FRPG, and there is the other crowd who likely came on during the Avalon Hill era RQ3, where it became a "generic" system not tied to any particular setting (or they simply are the people who just don't like Glorantha)
RQ until now has been out of the hands of the people who created it since essentially 1983, when Chaosium made the deal with AH. The game has died many times, and languished, but the fanbase has kept it alive during many lean years. Having it come back to the new Chaosium in the care of Stafford, Peterson, and the Moon Design crew would be like D&D coming back to Gygax (RIP).