Based on JJ3D alpha we are talking about a 3rd person 3d platformer with furry art and shooter gameplay; my observation of why Jackrabbits are different is movement speed and jump height since I never played any shooter where you can move so fast. So why was Jackrabbit such a big deal anyway? I can only give one overlooked yet outstanding answer and that is framerate; both JJ1 and JJ2 has much higher framerates than any competing games of their era and that is why graphics look better, looking more real to the eyes, and gameplay was more engaging, with less delay from your buttons to the screen. This is when standards were MS-DOS (Windows 3.1 was out then as well) and Windows 95 or 98. Today if we are talking about a PC/Macintosh game, competitors in 3d platformers, you have to let me look this up. Wikipedia is on the way.

"The first 3D first-person shooter game for a personal computer, 3D Monster Maze, had a frame rate of approximately 6 FPS, and was still a success. In modern action-oriented games where players must visually track animated objects and react quickly, frame rates of between 30 and 60 FPS are considered acceptable by most, though this can vary significantly from game to game. Modern action games, including popular console shooters such as Halo 3, are locked at 30 FPS maximum, while others, such as Unreal Tournament 3, can run well in excess of 100 FPS on sufficient hardware. Additionally some games such as Quake 3 Arena perform physics, AI, networking, and other calculations in sync with the rendered frame rate - this can result in inconsistencies with movement and network prediction code if players are unable to maintain the designed maximum frame rate of 125 FPS. The frame rate within games varies considerably depending upon what is currently happening at a given moment, or with the hardware configuration (especially in PC games). When the computation of a frame consumes more time than is allowed between frames, the frame rate decreases."

So basically we have comparable framerates of Unreal Tournament 3 at undesignated over 100 fps and Quake Arena 3 at 125 fps. This is not even better than JJ2+. And if Jackrabbit has not always been about highest framerate, I have not read the classic media about Jackrabbit that made it popular on Internet bulletin boards long ago. Which I will not try and research is comparisons between JJ1 framerate with other 1994 games and JJ2 framerates with other 1998 games.

Not to double post, furthermore I suggest the way to contact Epic is through their official forum. One individual is not going to make a company decision based on Twitter, email or postal mail. When I was a JJ1 fan, the first thing I ever remember doing with a web browser was go to the Epic forum and there I found discussion of Jazz pre-JJ2, when I was unaware of production of the sequel and do not know what stage of development it was in. And so my guess is that Epic is paying attention to their own forum as opposed to fansites, and to gather more supporters would require talking with people who play other games anyway. And it is probably totally proper to discuss Jackrabbit on Epic forum instead of trying to spam personal accounts on irrelevant pages.