No. Most of the good stuff was lifted into Windows NT decades ago. The rest has been far surpassed over the same time period by Linux and others. A few cool things probably fell into the cracks, but that's common in the industry.
It's interesting in a "what if/parallel universe" kind of way, but I certainly wouldn't touch it for anything new with that licensing.
Licensing cost is, indeed, a major deterrent for any green field project planning to run VMS. The same applies to any proprietary operating system, however, be it AIX, IBMi, z/OS, MCP, HP-UX, or Windows. I don't think there are many new work going on any of these platforms.