Yeah they released a 3.0 although it didn't do quite as well as one would hope. I think the initial turn off was the art, people hammered it for that without even reading a word of the game. There were some really odd strangeness to the setting that just didn't seem to fit in very well or were just to hyped up and anime style for what was the grim and gritty world of 2020.
The nanotech kids game you are mentioning is Cybergeneration which is considered to be it's own little alternate future of 2020 I believe.
Actually, V.3 used Cybergeneration as it's 'springboard'. It's 'official' as it's going to get, if I remember correctly.
The issue I had with version 3 was twofold. The first was the mechanics, a lot of it was cut and pasted from the older games with new ones slapped in with no sense as to how it would work together. But you can work around this.
The other major issue was story wise. The Paper Plague was, I am not going to mince words here and I apologize if this offends, the stupidest thing anyone could have thought up of. I'm no scientist, I'm an artist (and not that good) for heaven's sake and even I know that viruses go after living tissue, like trees and flesh, not paper which is actually pretty dead. And worse, viruses, even genetically tailored ones will mutate. Needless to say, the plague could have put a serious dent in the living population, and not harm a single paperback or hardcover book.
Next up was the counterpart 'electronic' virus that somehow managed to destroy single every piece of electronic data in the entire world, including corporate files. Via the internet. Which flies in the face of everything we've been taught about how the various corporations work. These are paranoid entities who will shoot first, and maybe clean up the bodies, should someone even hint at trying to get one of their secrets.
Most real world corporations have an in house intranet, which is sealed from the outside world. Not to mention that in CP2020, they'd likely have anything super important locked up in a vault, in triplicate and spread out among several locations. Just in case.
To actually wipe all that data would require a simultaneous setting off EMP bombs at every single physical data node at once. And that amount of power would destroy most of the world's infrastructure casting us back into the iron age if we're lucky. There would have been none of those 'alt-cultures'.
Which is yet another bone of contention. These groups of... Kids? (I forget) who belong to these gang like groups with access to super science technology, but each developing it in exclusion of everything else. Ignoring the 'Paper Plague' BS, there's no spying? No stealing of ideas? How in the world do you think the real world got where it is now in terms of technology? Because someone saw something cool that someone else was doing and managed to market it to the masses in a way that people believe they need it. The computer mouse? Xerox of the Photocopier fame made it first., or rather one of their engineering teams did. Apple managed to market it better for it's line of computers. Windows? It's a stolen copy of the Mac OS, gussied up and marketed to the point where it's ubiquitous. These 'Alt-Cults' as V.3 wanted to do wouldn't have happened. Not because it's unrealistic, it's because it's implausible by what we as a people know.
Science Fiction is ground in the reality that we know about, and unlike Fantasy, isn't something you can take that much liberties with. It doesn't have to be 'realistic', it just has to be 'plausible'. Sadly, Cyberpunk V.3 is not even close to being plausible.
In 'reality' as per the way Mr. Pondsmith set up 2020, the paper plague would be nothing more than a footnote. Their version of the Y2K bug. Maybe a couple million deaths world wide, and for the first year a lot less internet porn, but the rest of the world would have just trucked along nicely.
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