to 1)
Umm, RakNet just raised the engine license price to somewhat not worth the money ($50,000, from the 5,000$ before)! So I'm pretty sure that this will never happen. But what came into my mind right now:
Why drop a half-working network solution? Why should conitec not look at the RakNet source? Maybe this will transform the networkcode into something usable with SystemAddresses, Peers, Secure connections and BitStreams. I dont talk about illegal copy&past, but rather about some design ideas. And here in the community are a hand full of Cpp networking coders, so if conitec needs a helping hand...

2)
umm, TNL would be the next option (there are no better low-cost libs out there AFAIK). But compared the the advanced features of RakNet (Client Updater, DB Connection, Local DB, Lobby Server, BitStreams, Automatic compression and secure connections, just to name A FEW) the torque solution is rather small. I never worked with it, maybe someone else can state whether it's worth looking at.

Next option would be an upd-layer like
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.p...f509e6f4e2718c6
(just saw this last week)
or a selfwritten library. But do we really want this? In this case the rest of the engine would sleep for weeks for sure.