That's a a totally valid way to do it, of course!
Personally, I'm brand new to Traveller and the setting and while I find a lot of little gems scattered around the 3rd Imperium setting, I'm pretty meh on it in general.
Things I don't like about it:
- The bulk of the Imperium isn't particularly rich material for exciting adventures. Yes, you can be involved in Imperial politics and royalty/megacorp shenanigans but the bulk of the inner Imperium is fairly homogenous. It's like how you drive across the US and there's gonna be a McDs and Starbucks everywhere you go. A lot of the core, you could just swap one system for another with no consequence. The interesting stuff is mostly out at the periphery at the frontiers and buffer zones. Of course, there's enough Core adventure hooks to keep a group busy for years but if you're looking for other styles of play, it's not the best part of the universe. Of the Traveller material, most of it seems to be at the peripheries such as the Spinward Marches or the Rift, etc. I assume that the authors realized that the sort of niches that most PCs thrive in generally occur at the borders and intersticies rather than the burbs of a universe.
- Most of the species are essentially humans in masks or furry outfits. Of the major powers that border the Imperium, 2 are human and the Vargr and Aslan are basically people with certain personality traits turned way up. The only power that feels genuinely alien to me are the Hive. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a universe full of vulcans and klingons but it's not the sort of sci-fi experience I want for my game.
I think of Vernor Vinge's (who I just found out died last year) Fire Upon the Deep, still one of the best space operas ever written. In there, there's [mild spoilers] a race of canine-like sophonts. Except the individual animals are basically dog-level intelligent but can create linked hive-mind intelligences through ultrasound communication. The individual dogs can only manipulate objects with their prehensile mouths and so any complex tools require multiple bodies working in unison. Each person in the species is composed of a pack of dogs whose intelligence increases with pack size. Their culture is cutthroat as larger packs often try to use subterfuge or force to absorb the dogs of smaller packs, effectively killing the smaller individual. Their punishments for severe crimes involve this sort of death. Packs can temporarily split up if circumstance requires them to be in multiple locations but they run the risk of developing into separate personalities when they do that. Sometimes fragments of absorbed personalities can survive and break free of the larger pack but are usually partly insane. Can you imagine how interesting it would be to slap some eyepatches and a jolly roger on that species for the Vargr?
- The fact that the Imperium is surrounded on all sides yet all the other powers essentially have an endless frontier to expand into. By all sense, all the empires around it should have massively outgrown it and become vastly more powerful. Look at the craziness of the Zhodani coreward expedition. All those colonizable worlds along the corridor path of the expedition would dwarf the Imperium and there's no competition for those worlds.
I could go on but in general, there's a lot of canon in the Imperium that's at odds with the sort of sci-fi game I want to play. In spite of that, there's a ton of great source material that is easy to mine. Most of it really doesn't even need to be set in the 3rd Imperium since it's set out at the ragged edge of the empire. Honestly, hard rebooting the whole setting to break up all the empires gives you more places to set a lot of the Traveller material I've seen. The catalyst of another dark age is the perfect excuse to mix things up.
If the epicenter of the destruction is the core worlds, it's not implausible that the Spinward Marches and other areas around it become the new cultural center of gravity. (along with some surviving remnants of the rimward Solemani) That would naturally place smaller neo-imperial intrigue near the areas where most of the PC action is likely to occur rather than a full year of travel away. You could have your royalty politics just a few jumps away from the wild frontier.
Imagine a splinter faction of K'Kree that had to resort to cannibalism to survive and are now enthusiastic meat eaters and are engaged in a vicious civil war with their other bretheren.
The Hive might undergo a massive species breakdown as they would have been unable to maintain their genetic homogeneity efforts and the inevitable genetic drift on hundreds of worlds would possibly make them xenophobic to themselves. That might redouble their desire to work with and integrate other species into their culture while also trying to get as far away from other Hiver groups as possible in a giant diaspora across known space.
I could go on but I don't see a Virus reboot as throwing out all the existing source material but instead allowing it to be remixed and used in fun new ways. Since I don't have any particular nostalgia about the default setting, it's far more attractive to me to start slicing and dicing.