I help out from time to time; if you've got any ideas how to make HiveWE better, you could probably give them a try and submit a pull request.
As for how HiveWE is compiled, it's just Visual Studio with VCPKG for package management. Due to VS's module support being pretty experimental, only the "RelWithDebInfo" build preset works at this time, but the rest of it is standard, git to clone the source code and vcpkg+visual studio with MSVC to compile it. There is also a step-by-step tutorial on the Github page itself (near the bottom), but it might not be 100% up to date (
this Github issue was an experience of another person, might serve as a helpful resource until VCPKG finally updates packages and how they're copied over post-build).
1.32 AND 1.33 have also been very rocky patches, so many things aren't as before, and some not for the better, which can easily kill a project, or its team's motivation :/ I do have pending PRs to make it support the base level of 1.33 data, but contributing to the project might be hard until they're merged to the main branch as even getting the project to run would require some git magic (adding my repo as a remote [let's call it bogdanw3], then git merge bogdanw3/v1100 and git merge bogdanw3/33). And only then you have to battle the problems of VCPKG...
With where the game is headed, the future is uncertain, and as such, progress might be slow from the very rational worry about it being for naught. And on the other side of the madness, disorder of Microsoft's VCPKG is a constant in the universe