From what gunnar said in public he negotiated with Hyperion and the answer was very honest that they are not interested in 68k. So either they changed mind since that or they just want to make some easy money without investing to much efforts in it. Before I do not see anything different I would bet on the second.
This was a long phone conference, and it's not that simple to summarize it in a single sentence. I was not participating, but I also talked to Hyperion later on to see what was the issue.
Part of the problem on the Hyperion side was also that Gunnar wanted to get control on the Kickstart and wanted to include there custom modules or patches for his particular hardware. You should also know that a vendor does not easily give away control over his assets, and that this request was also quite unnecessary as the Kickstart has enough options to address custom hardware such as autoconfig that is known since ever. Gunnar's approach is not a wise decision from a software engineering approach, and while I do not agree with much Hyperion does, I at least agree with that keeping the Kickstart sources free of custom patches for third-party hardware.
So every story has to sides, and at that point of time, the two parties did not come together, not due to the fault of a single party alone. Partially because Hyperion did not yet fully understand what they were really seeing and which market chances they were missing, partially because Gunnar was also expecting too much from such a deal. The story is a bit longer than simply "they had no interest in 68K".
This does not mean that the story ended there. We're just observing that it is going on. There are still, as said, a couple of improvements in the drawer, and I really hope I find the time to put a couple of my contributions back to where they belong. It's just that JPEG keeps me very busy these days - just being at another meeting in Chengdu, China, BTW.