In these days of Wolf4SDL, LZWolf, and general advancement of modding, projects that exceed the original Wolfenstein 3D in features and scope are reasonably common.
Back in 2003 however, modding using changes to the source code was still in it's infancy. People were still fumbling around discovering things, and major features like floor and ceiling textures were still new.
So when Kreml 3D was announced, it caught immediate interest from the general community.