it shows not synced because so much time has passed since last block was solved. no block solved = no transactions.
the issue with doing a coin swap on a working blockchain is the 13 coin premine the vanishing dev holds. that would be looming unless you tried to not honor his coins. the issue with us getting 1/2 coins we had and issuing a new 50 set to encourage adoption is that while many got .01 for free, a lot of us paid on bittrex in the .4 range. i guess anythings better than nothing.. but the current blockchain is pushing up daisy's as they say.
The current blockchain has no issues IMO. This is a problem with alot of POS coins with low coin count and low adoption. No transactions and no staking. Even if you did a swap with similar stats you could have the same issues if the Dev does not compensate for these issues in the coding. This coin could easily be fixed if the developer would come back or atleast hand the reigns to someone else. It just needs a new wallet that is coded properly and a hard fork.
Edit: Also if you were to do a coin swap perhaps a swap for 1 to .5 would be good but without the extra 50 pow. There by not decreasing value of coins held theoretically and making it even more rare just like the actual double eagles where most were destroyed and the remaining were made priceless. This also would require a dev that could code correctly for such a low count coin and also perhaps increasing stake atleast for a period would get people interested and get the blockchain moving.