Heh, it didn't sound THAT dire...
I will say, EsperKnight did start off promising as we didn't have very many talented hackers working on PCE CD games, I mean, you can count them with your hands, elmer included. But yeah, his work didn't seemingly translate to 100% completed PCE CD projects.
He did an impressive variable-width font hack for Startling Odyssey II, but it didn't work on real NEC hardware, only emulators... Bonknuts offered to do this for me in 2006 I believe, but I wasn't interested, and I had helped transfer the project over to Tru hoping he'd find a real translator, but he wound up doing it himself Jeff "DeuceBag" Nussbaum style with online dictionary/translation sites, so who knows the quality results in that...
The sequel Star Breaker also needs a font hack job, and its script is stored in easy plain S-JIS text, so if that got done, it could open the project up to someone less talented.
Anyway, we need more talented people is the real issue I think but they are understandably hard to find.