Tl dr - There was never a separate project, that content was just removed from the game because frankly it wasn't good content.
Frankly, I am confident that if development on ElDewrito was to continue we would have seen the removal of Saber's new weapons and powerups, and possibly even Saber's four maps as the devs tried to get closer and closer to a 'vanilla Halo 3' experience on PC. They simply removed the armors and Halo: Online start screen / menus because they don't align with Bungie's original Halo games. There was not any ulterior motives or anything like that. The ElDewrito version of Halo Online is still online and functioning, with thousands of players matchmaking in its wholly free online multiplayer lobbies as of. So what did they do? Tried to remove as many traces of Saber Interactive's work as possible in order to return the game to a more 'classic' Halo experience. After years on ice, a mod that makes it playable the world. What the devs were striving for was to get much closer to Halo 3. Halo Online is a free-to-play version of the popular shooter series that was only ever offered in a closed beta test in Russia in 2015.
This means their armors, their menus, their colored weapons, etc. To put it simply, most of the developers for ElDewrito (the mod that makes Halo: Online (ms23) playable for you all) did not like ANY of the features that Saber Interactive added to the game.
