I'm sorry that the MA team is having so many problems, but you couldn't have chosen a better place than Italy for a small-scale mod. Are you going to include all of the features that were originally planned for MA (provincial titles, etc.)? I think that would really pique interest as people would want to see it in a full scale conversion.

Try posting a recruitment thread in the Vacancy for M2TW, it might help with recruitment. Good luck and I hope you can eventually start on the full MA project.