So there is this idea that Saboteur is like an anti-remodel and the downgrade of 2 for your opponent is about the same as an upgrade of 2 for one of your own cards. However, Saboteur is not quite the reverse of Remodel as we know it. The reverse of Saboteur would look more like this:
Recreate - Action
Reveal cards from the top of your deck until revealing one costing $1 or more. Trash it and gain a card costing up to $2 more than it.
The key here is that you're not sacrificing a card from your hand to get the remodel effect. Lookout and loan also have the benefit of trashing a card outside of your hand and maybe providing some cycling at the same time.
A thought occurs when looking at this remodel variant though. If it were to cost $5, it would look much worse than Rebuild. It has no +action, no name-a-card thing, nothing. It's too bad, because this card looks like it could be fun.
Is it really that much worse than Rebuild? this card could be good in a gold centric deck and help put things together faster, but it's unreliable. If it is terrible, than what does that mean for Saboteur? Is Saboteur that much worse than Rebuild as well? Um... yeah probably, except perhaps when Saboteur is battling Rebuild itself. Kind of like the Spy-Admiral interaction in Stratego.
So I feel like Saboteur is better than this reverse-Sab thing for some reason. The Reverse-Sab is unreliable and can hurt your deck if it hits the wrong thing, though it probably adds uncertainty more than anything else. Sab on the other hand adds uncertainty to your opponent's deck, not your own. In particular, it can trash the remodel variant card of your opponent, which may be the key difference between the two.
What are your thoughts on this?