I think regardless of personal views, the project is essentially tainted and should be avoided. Too many users will feel alienated by the controversy. I came to kbin because the lack of such controversy points to better viability for such a large community.
So where do you think kbin's best odds lie at the moment? Clone and rewrite it in a different language while it's still early or work with what's there? Get a couple of iterested devs together to do some brainstorming?
Rewriting it in a different language/framework was my first thought. Honestly, though, it is pretty large and I don't think I have the amount of time I would want to contribute to such a project. I might still make an attempt, but I agree that the best bet is to have a number of dedicated volunteers get together, plan something out, and execute as a team.
I also have real concerns about the architecture that was chosen. It is going to be really hard to scale this without just throwing a ton of money at it to horizontally scale [edit: or vertically scale, right now, since this doesn't seem to be ready for any kind of clustering] the entire app at once. It's just being operated as a single docker container running on a single VPS. This is just asking for trouble. The ecosystem with which it needs to integrate is mature enough that some reasonable optimizations can be made to keep performance good, especially around the federation APIs, clustering, and other separation of concerns.