I'm not so sure. The leadership at Microsoft nowadays is quite different compared with back then. I do think the need for (something like) ALT.NET perhaps isn't there in the way it was back in 2007-09 because the software development, and particularly the web development, landscape has changed so much over the past 10 years.
One of the reasons we're keen to do this - or at least to try it! - is that both the industry and Microsoft have changed enormously in the last ten years. There's a much richer range of platforms available, and there's all sorts of new protocols and patterns we can use to integrate those platforms - and with stuff like containerization and serverless cloud functions, there's all kinds of interesting ways to use .NET and .NET Core as part of a larger heterogenous application stack.
It will also be interesting - in the widest possible sense of the word - to see how the interactions between altnet and 2017-era Microsoft play out as compared to the 2007-era Microsoft. As the saying goes, watch this space :)
