Well, I was going to be looking for a sprite/tile artist once I had gotten enough done to be confident that I would finish; I'm a coder, and I have a friend of mine writing the story for it. I figured I'd do the maps, because I'm okay at it - but help would be cool. I was kind of tired at the time I posted the message above - What I meant to say was that the members of Chrono Compendium who were working on an RD hack already should coordinate.
Yue is a spriter, my friend is a writer, I'm a coder, and Strummer can play the guitar (ha... *cough*) - or maybe do more graphics, or mapping, or something. I have already figured out how to do a couple of the things you asked in my own hack (Just has an opening sequence which pans across a different version of the world of RD, and a small dialogue sequence between Kid and Serge): I changed the default names, and I moved the ship to a different location.
If Yue or Strummer want to coordinate something (which would be pretty sweet), then they could PM me or just post here.
If not, I'll just go sulk in a corner.
Anyway, peace out.
-mintman
Edit: Although I think that the sprite of Serge that you made looks awesome, it looks much more like the Serge in Chrono Cross than the Serge in Radical Dreamers. And while I admit that the Serge in RD looks kind of... odd, it might be better to make the Serge in your remake into something closer to the original Serge.