TBH, I'm not jonesing for Rare games myself. Other than Perfect Dark, I didn't even care much for them on the Nintendo 64 or SNES. Nintendo could use Rare's IPs to shore up the Wii U and 3DS in "off times" between EAD and Tokyo releases, like they did on N64, and I guess that's cool if it moves systems.

Viva Pinata was pretty fun if you ask me.

People over exaggerate the "downfall" in quality of Rare. Viva Pinata, Nuts and Bolts, KI and Kameo were all great games that all Xbox owners should play. They're just different and that's what annoys people.

There are at least two veteran Rareware guys that have been with the company since 1989 and are still there today. Most of everybody else however was either fired or resigned. I don't think it's possible to get all the ex-Rare people back together. You could probably get couple of guys to collaborate on something. Musician David Wise who a freelance worker now did the soundtrack for Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and it was fantastic. Conker creator Chris Seavor is a huge Nintendo fan and is currently working on the Unlikely Legend of Rusty Pup for the 3DS and Wii U. I know the guy who used to voice Banjo got laid off from Rare after the latest Kinect Sports game bombed.

I do not think there's any chance of bringing Tim and Chris Stamper back. They outright left the video game industry in 2007 and had not been heard from since. All that I know is that Tim Stamper is the current owner of Eydon Hall in Northamptonshire. No doubt thanks to the money he received from the buyout deal.

The talent that made up the core of Rare before MS bought it never got fired. They quit when they got word that Ninteno would not make a bid for the full ownership of the company. 

While those games were good in their own right, there's no real argument that the quality in Rare's games had gone down since the Microsoft buyout and there was a a lot of that had to do with the internal conflict within Rare that was never there before. Under Microsoft's reign there were probably more Rare games that got the axe than what was released. I'm not talking about ideas that never made it off the drawing board. I'm talking about games that were actually in development and got axed. Speaking of those franchises you mentioned, Microsoft also abandoned those as well. The latest banjo game failed to sell and Microsoft had not touched the franchise since other than having an outside developer port the first two games to Xbox Live Arcade. A Kameo sequel was in development and got cancelled. They tried to make Viva Pinata into a big franchise but abandoned it when the sequel failed to sell.

Longtime developers either left Rare or were fired. The company creators left the videogame industry. A lot of internal changes were made at Rare including having more supervisors, more company meetings and closing down the entire testing department, which was the birthplace of some of Rare's classics. Rare was then reduced to being the average hire and fire game development studio. So unlike the N64 games when Rare would put out multple high quality games in a single year that were mega hits, their Microsoft years reduced them to putting out a mix of good games and so-so games once or twice every couple of years and Microsoft seemed to have no real idea of how to market those games.