Ok. You can keep living in the reality that you make up for yourself then where you believe there is any point at all in them bothering with such a lie.
Anyway, this is the reason why the remake is done in the fashion it is done in.
But… after some more digging… it seems that leading up to them making the remake they were able to cobble together a good bit of the remaining source code and even a lot of the assets - however Vicarious Visions claimed that the assets weren’t as important as was originally thought since they remade a lot of it themselves.
As for Goobers theory that they should have completely rebuilt the game - I stand by my original assertion that that would be a horrible idea for a remake. Most people want the same game, just updated visually, primarily. Rebuilding from the ground up is exactly how you ensure you don’t get “the same game”.
If they were to have done that, you would have only ended up with millions of very pissed off people.