One awesome thing BMS did with their water was make it shiny and realistic looking using shaders--something EECH has never had(but EECH 2 does). Has EECH been ported to a recent enough version of Direct X yet to add this?

It still uses direcx7, so it can't do effects like that.

There has always been a plan to upgrade the version of directx that it uses, probably to directx 9. But we've not enough modders with experience.

I've just bought a book on directx 9 to try and understand how it works. So hopefully I'll be able to try and work on that at some point.