Blegh, time to watch some more python tutorials...
Not completely rewritten. There are tools (http://docs.python.org/library/2to3.html) that'll do most of the work in converting a Python 2 module to Python 3; some manual effort is still involved, but it's far from a complete rewrite.
from my experience python is quite slow when working with files, compared to let's say powershell, but maybe this is a different use (i was computing hashes)
Yes the blender plugin is outdated, as newer Blender versions use a completely different API and plugin structure. But I'm currently working on a different approach which works a lot faster.
It doesn't make sense just to port the old version, as the python code is just too slow.