It sounds like the effort might have been a step in the right direction, but hardly a solution in its own right. The result would be a literal case of the aphor

It sounds like the effort might have been a step in the right direction, but hardly a solution in its own right. The result would be a literal case of the aphorism "You can write assembly in any language." The translation would have some minor benefits: interop with java libraries would be nice, it could help to plug the system into better infrastructure like a modern testing framework, and it might run a little more securely. (I wonder whether you could craft a tax return to crash this system.) But it wouldn't have magically produced readable modern java code.