As someone who used both Telegard and Renegade... no. Just no. Renegade literally just lifted the Telegard 2.5i source code, added a few trivial changes, and made a few bugfixes. Disagree? Name five of these 'commercial features' it added.

It's a sad truth of bulletin board software that sysops often didn't know what other software was capable of and blindly engaged in the sort of bit-bashing people engaged in when it comes to hardware... not because the other guy's stuff was genuinely bad, but because the sysop didn't want to admit that maybe they wasted a bunch of time and effort on a piece of shit.