Looks like @lft has been meaning to do that, although it’s been a few years since he mentioned it:
Yes, the runner contains a significant chunk of the logic. .taf game files contain high-level instructions to be acted upon by a fairly complex engine (the runner). In a sense, you could say they are conceptually closer to Excel spreadsheet files with macros than the low-level byte code of other IF systems like Glulx.
Of course, as you say, none of that is .NET specific, but writing a new “runner” engine from scratch would still be a substantial endeavour because the system is pretty complex and also fairly under-documented. Just like LibreOffice is still prone to mangling the formatting of Word documents, I doubt that an ADRIFT5 reimplementation could ever achieve perfect compatibility.
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Microsoft deliberately breaks compatibility in all sorts of shady ways. They’ve always done so throughout their history (long before LibreOffice).
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… and the internals of the ADRIFT 5 file format are entirely undocumented. (Except by way of the published, but itself undocumented, ADRIFT source code.) So I think the comparison holds.
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