Meh, Ultima Underworld did not look like crap. It also used sprites.

It wasn't a total flop. You just don't know every decent Doom 3 TC. For instance, now I'm not expert on Doom 3 mods (because, frankly, I monitor open source games) but I still know about the excellent The Dark Mod - a total conversion Thief-inspired game. I'm sure there's plenty more.

Note quite Elite 4, but a pretty good fan-made successor is Oolite. The test versions include support for shaders, bringing more modern looking ships to the game.

http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/

Well on the way to being a usable replacement engine, built with modern tools, instead of some 10+ year old codebase.