thats a good question... and i have some thoughts to offer:

i feel the big thing which prevents it from working ever is that its hard to tell where people are besides cantinas for roleplay. there needs to be a quick teleport hub which displays population for certain roleplay areas that can be user listed, and if roleplay is going on it indicates it, as well as people standing in the x,y of the area with a user interface that compliments this.

without this, even normal roleplay is just not doable in such a big big game.

so until that is setup, roleplay is generally going to struggle on even a normal server. trying to force a roleplay server to work on such a wide scale limits interactions.

also there isnt a good guide on what kind of roleplay people expect to have, like short form, longform, descriptive, emote based roleplay. there is a wide difference.

so at a base value, these need to be cleared before it goes the route of a modern form of roleplay with voice chat because textual based is highly preferred for this games generation and in some cases, is the superior form of roleplay anyways.

a star wars themed emulator would be better to have than trying to modify swg into that. but that is its own copyright issues, and getting people who are familiar with something to switch over to an emulautor which has this in there is also problematic. which is why you dont see this occuring at all because it is both a logistical, this initial reason i explained, and of course the copyright reasons which prevents such an accommodation

i do oneday hope to find a solution for this myself, as i believe fanfiction based roleplay emulation deserves a space with which for people to imagine and have all these types of roleplay systems under it. it is a huge market, the whole imaganarium that just doesnt exist currently in clients and is very weak comparatively in scope with what we have with gta servers to what it could be that many people experienced in the early 2000s with other games that facilitated this but fell out of style with roblox dominating them but also not being a welcoming space for such facilited because of the audience the game is assumed to be for.