Friendly fork of the PunBB source tree?

For some time now I have been considering the current state of the popular BB software available, and frankly they're too bloated and all seem to be suffering from bad cases of feature creep. After spending some time looking for a minimalistic alternative and finding a number of projects which claimed to be so, but were not, I decided that I had no alternative other than making one myself from scratch (removing all the cruft from, for example, phpBB would almost certainly take considerably longer, and I would not learn nearly as much); i've been working on it in my spare time over the Christmas break (being a University student means that I don't have a great deal of time during the semmesters) and have a reasonable amount of the basic stuff implemented. And then an idle google search while looking for information for one of my assignments found a page with a link to this site.

Now punBB is almost exactly what I was looking for in many respects; it is minimalistic, well documented, themeable & (very importantly)uses valid XHTML 1.0 STICT & CSS. Unfortunatally it is not as bare-bones as I was hoping for/intending to develop; it has some features that I had not intended to have installed by default (for example Avatars, userdata pertaining to their location, IM usernames and the like) and lacked one major I did want installed by default, which the option to enable and disable threaded and flat discussion on a per-forum basis. To augment this there would be a number of supported modification modules which could be optionally installed to add support for the features not installed by default.

My question is whether the developers of PunBB would have any objections to a fork of the source tree with the intention of making the above BB implementations possible; my modifications would of course be released under the GPL licence and additionally any pertinant bugfixes and tweaks and such could (and almost certainly would) be shared between the two projects.

I am eager to hear the response of the developers, and if they would prefer that I did not fork the source code then I will respect their wishes. Conversely if there is interest in removing some of the features moving them into user-installable modules & adding support for threaded discussion I would be very glad to co-operate with the current team to that end (I hope that does not sound arrogant, if it does then I assure you that it was not my intention -- but many hands make light work & with an established community of users & developers who are familiar with the source such modifications would likely prove to be relatively trivial).

I eagerly await a response...

ptlis