Welcome to the Dojo, Warthog, I must say I'm surprised at the positive welcome you've had so far. Normally, as you probably know, saying that Shenmue III won't appear is fightin' words and will unleash a barrage of flame in your direction.
You have an interesting idea - I must say it never occurred to me that we, the fans, would have even the smallest bone thrown our way. After all, if they released the scenario or the scripts, then some fan could make a 2D game out of it! Or other fans would make a live action movie! I wouldn't mind any of that!
But the sad reality is that Sammy/SEGA will sooner or later pull out a list of games we are never going to see again, and Shenmue will be near the top of the list. And that will be all she wrote.
Sorry I sound down, but the fact is the company I work for has recently had its share of troubles, lost clients etc - and the upshot is that everybody loses morale, nobody sticks around - they leave to work for the biggest rivals, and it's very hard to keep the spark of creativity going under such circumstances. So unless the whole exercise was because the CEO of Sammy was a huge Shenmue fan and bought SEGA to order that they make Shenmue III, I myself am not very optimistic.