I actually beg to differ.
I undertook a near-total overhaul of the existing implementation. From the outset, I knew the result would be radically different from Sean’s. It was also not a collaborative development - I sought to implement things in a manner different from the existing work, intentionally so as to improve the operational efficiency of the implementation, and to support additional features. The existing architecture simply would not have been able to be “incrementally updated” to achieve my objectives.
While Sean did begin the attempt to re-integrate, he quickly found that there weren’t really “modular improvements” that could be added to his code, tested and released…it is more an all-or-nothing overhaul.
So, I took some open source, re-engineered it into a very different implementation, but keeping with the look and feel and operational interfaces as defined by SmartThings and Sean. I don’t see this as a “down side” of open source…rather, the availability of this accelerated my efforts to build a robust alternative to the pay-gate Ecobee DTH offered elsewhere. And I am now well into new enhancements and integrations (Ask Alexa, for example) that further distance this implementation from prior works.
In the end, we have 3 related but not differing implementations: the original from SmartThings, the enhanced version that Sean built on top of that, and the one I’ve built upon the cornerstone of Sean’s work. That they aren’t all “evolutions” within a single GitHub tree is (IMHO) not really all that important…
And FWIW, Sean is free to take the leap of faith and just drop my complete current code on top of his existing version. GitHub will not be able to cleanly identify all the individual changes, and he will lose my evolutionary steps that got me where this is today. Heck, he could even go back and start from the beginning of my branch (which was in fact copied, just not forked, from his implementation), and then roll the last 6 months of evolution into his tree.
Understanding this is both unlikely and unnecessary, I have instead created a separate branch for my own implementation. Use it (for free) if you like, or ignore it…makes no matter to me…