1. Cocos2d-x v3.2 is a mess. It was a major release that added features that I don't care about without fixing what is obviously broken and made the terrible documentation situation even worse because it broke backwards compatibility with all existing tutorials for an increasingly complicated framework that essentially doesn't have English language documentation.
2. I don't like the sort of high-level direction that cocos2d-x is going in. They've now released an IDE for putting together script-based games and this is what they seem to care about. To support the IDE they are bringing more and more stuff into the framework proper to facilitate the scripting of these features by making them cocos2d-x objects e.g. physics is now in the framework itself, 3d is now in the framework itself, etc. If you use this stuff you get locked into the development choices of the cocos2d-x developers who make cavalier choices driven by the fact that they are entirely interested in creating a framework that allows developing certain kinds of generic games quickly not with creating an elegant framework for any kind of 2d game.

1. From the cocos2d-x v3.2 codebase take just the following: The Sprite hierarchy and the node tree model -- scenes, scene transitions (maybe), layers, basic sprite types, input handling, audio, and the action model and nothing else. No integrated physics, no 3D nodes, no javascript integration.
2. Get rid of the current memory management stuff entirely and replace with std::shared_ptr, std:weak_ptr, and std::unique_ptr.
3. Get rid of all internal usage and exposed to the framework user usage of nonstandard container types. Replace with std::vector, std::list, et al.
4. Support only iOS and Android.
5. Write English as a first language documentation for the above.

First off, I'd wonder about the usefulness of removing the features. It may make it easier for you to understand

It's mostly about making it easier for me to do.

I want to rip out the memory stuff that is basically a port of the way cocoa/nextstep handles allocation because of cocos2d-x's roots in cocos2d-iphone which is Objective-C. Cutting features makes for less stuff that I am going to break in the process of doing this and therefore less stuff that I have to make sure works again. (and to be honest it is also partially about philosophical differences but if I could push a button that would magically clean everything up without removing anything I would probably push it).

Doing something with memory management was actually one of the big motivations for version 3 in the first place -- there was a lot of discussion about this in the forums last summer. Me and a few other people were arguing to just move to standard C++ smart pointers, but it ultimately didn't go that way, with the people who did the work on version 3, citing performance concerns, not touching memory at all. I never really bought into the performance argument and just lost interest in version 3, although the new renderer thing is nice.

But regardless, this is basically why I am posting about something that I am going to do for my use ... I am interested if anyone else wants this. My hypothesis is that most of the advanced features aren't being used anyway because they aren't sufficiently well documented and aren't implemented in a general enough way to be particularly useful. From reading the forums, I think most people use the node tree and actions, period. I don't know for sure but am guessing this is what is happening.

Didn't actually think about possible legal issues but you are right.