@Shadowsong
Actually the reason why I target this question to you is because I saw your signature, I would really like a honest feedback on this one.
I told you in my reply how I would approach this in your place.
I will share with you how I feel about this topic:
I tried already to work on such a project (replace all tibia sprites), and it's an astonishing amount of work, especially if you want them to look anywhere decent. If you try to include multiple artists to accomplish this, you will, first of all, have trouble even finding them (assuming they're not complete beginners), and then on top of that you will face wild style inconsistencies which will make the project look like a clown fiesta in summation.
I know people currently actively looking for decent Tibia spriters (not just other people, I myself was looking for a spriter until a few days ago too), who are willing to pay good money, and it's next to impossible to find. Thinking you will find someone to do this workload, do it right, and do it for free is lunacy in my experience.
Furthermore, the current .spr format and the tools we have currently for editing .dat/.spr are not optimal and result in huge wastes of time when doing sprite addition or replacement. You need to take a weekend off to just implement a few (finished) smooth-walking idle-animated outfits, not to mention the amount of effort it goes into creating them. That's about
4608 32x32 px frames for a single outfit (male+female). Try doing it, and check how you feel realizing you have to do this about 30-40 more times, and that's just human outfits - what about literally everything else?
You need to put into scope what you're aiming at.
Cipsoft has been building their sprite repository with numerous artists and (now) millions in their budget, for 2 decades.
Your best bet, and smart move, is to try and employ AI to match that kind of workload, or reduce the workload very very drastically by cutting features and inclusions left and right, with a machete.
I personally wouldn't do that kind of massive amount of work and then release it (which isn't even OT-exclusive and can be abused and resold literally anywhere where there's a demand for sprites), especially not after going through the kind of stuff I've gone through with various community members while trying to be fair to people. ¯\
(ツ)/¯
The 'gross' estimation is actually a paretto distribution that seems to work when we compare diffs of different projects, so it's not something I just made up. They can have different ideas, but in general they don't manage to actually put those ideas in practice, and that explains the similarities.
I'm bet by now you are judging me naive by my beliefs towards people working together, this is actually happening already. I'm not asking for something I'm not willing to commit myself to, I'm inviting others to participate in something greater.
Each of us have different beliefs about perfect server and there's even people who don't bother to make a server at all. Vast majority of the things are common to everyone.
EDIT: Sorry, this part got cut out.
What's the point of comparing diff when there is no real choice or alternative? Most servers here use some version of TFS and that's an undeniable fact. Not because they really want those features, or that server, but because there's not much other choice, and they don't have the knowledge nor time to put together a new engine which fills only their needs. If there is no real choice there, of course the majority is using the same codebase and basing everything on the same code.
Yes, I judged you by what you said, what else is there to judge by, it really came off as naive. If you are able to prove this wrong, then please do, but before you invite people to do projects of such scope, show some plan, show some roadmap, show a strict set of goals and that you're serious about it. I haven't yet seen an agreement among the community on how this should be done.