Donations, as much as it would be nice to have, is not an issue.
Project is and will continue to be Free and Open Source.
Forking L2J was inevitable, since in my svn I can instanlty fix problems / missing features, on L2J those fixes would never be commited.
I am not a fan of custom stuff, thats why I dropped l2p support (since after a year of improvements and team work, was still crappy),
but in my opinion some things that can/need to be done in some way must not be ignored. Retail solutions may even take months to be made properly.
My current plan for the project is to surpass the old l2p svn (datapack) and try fixing some core related problems, while keeping up to date with latest L2J changes.
Again there are only a couple of people helping with it, each with his own limited time and life issues, so don't expect miracles.