I just thought it might be a low-risk way to re-kindle the fan base and feed a starving C++ programmer at the same time

If you're getting anything at all form Steam sales, it might help those.
If not prohibited by your publishing agreement (probably is), you could sell the kickstart funded "fan packs" directly on your website (tied to the purchaser's steam ID?) for $5-$10-$20 each.
As for the mod tools, I was just hoping to get the development asset pipeline utilities and other development quality tools out there... From (old) forum posts, they were already being used in-house, but were not quite consumer ready which is fine as I don't think that would bother anyone left modding today. I'm still trying to reverse engineer the model and animation formats and then there's the UI element editor I want to write
