I don't see any meaning of that copycat project because exhentai admin if totally willing to give all data and possibly even entire site with all scripts to someone if there are people willing to take it. he is no longer willing to maintain it himself in this neutered form.

Exhentai was almost all about traffic and performance
it hosts about 50 terabytes of content. It woud be pretty expensive to, build such server and put it at home or rent some server on the farm.
it also had pretty clever distributed p2p caching system

I am not sure but from all that info I suspect that exhentai admin was keeping his server at home and this is why he was so quick to shut it down and cannot relocate it to another state.

so the only real hope is that admin will give everything to someone else and it will just continue as before. Creating all that from scratch will be too hard.