@Otto - Thanks for clarifying. I completely understand and agree that ideally you shouldn't take anything away from anyone.

It's one of the reasons why GitHub forking is great as it's easy to discover other branches of a plugin if development on the one you're using seems to dry up, but doesn't take anything away from the original author. I'm guessing WP.org won't be heading that way anytime soon?

You say you'll resort to snail mail - that really is going the extra mile :)
Have you actually had to resort to snail mail before?