Reading over the Freelancer Editing forum over at Lancers Reactor... doesn't seem like it'd be incredibly hard to edit the game and make it better...
What you'd need to do if you're seriously interested in doing a mod, is to outline what is wrong with the game and how it could be made better via modifications. Obviously we'd all like to see a more balanced economy and more ships (plus battlecruisers and other currently unflyable ships). Once you've planned what you want to do, it shouldn't take that long to edit the proper .ini's and/or create new ones to get the desired affect.
I'm sure Mael would be happy to host the mod and fire up TDS once again.
=V3=