I think a lot of it is the time involved... I'm not at all familiar with the codebase, and the backend is iirc Ruby.
May be worth taking a loot at a refresh for a few things... I've often thought it would be cool to rewrite as-is to node (maybe deno?) and from there work on feature enhancements.
It shouldn't take long at all to make some minor mobile improvements. See https://github.com/echojs/echojs/blob/master/public/css/style.css
I guess a good start would be identifying what actually needs improving:
- reduced font-size
- fix the <pre> length on news detail view
It'd be good if the OP gave some suggestions...