No one really knows what the endgame of software security looks like.
So some people should try the port to rust angle, some should focus on hardening the C, some should explore more exotic options like formally provable languages etc
1) There may be situation were are fork makes sense (e.g. because one project can not serve different use cases well): 2) Which is why usually a "higher goal" is used to justify this, e.g. authors pretend (or lie to themselves, or may be be stupid enough to actually believe this) that some improvement in memory safety is really that important.
You've been caricatured into a blind AI-follower rust-rewriter-just-because type, and that's the surface they'll continually attack (you're wasting time, hurting the community, v2-itis, bikeshedding, premature optimization, copyright violation, moustache-twirling-evil-intent-rug-pull-later, etc etc etc).
Just continue in your work. It's good, and we need people like you.