Thanks- The Wilderness Project isn't just the forest- I've redone all of the biomes as well as getting the burning biome brought back and adding the potential for three more custom ones, including the swamp. The additional biomes is an experimental feature and so far it's been working fine and there's just some UI cleanup involved. I vaguely remember looking over hdhq a long time ago but never installed it.
Since you mentioned it, I went ahead and hunted it down and took a look at it and I can definitely say I've done things a lot differently. I'll be looking forward to the feedback once I roll out public testing. Internal has been going on for close to a year now and my target has been updating to Alpha 21 and making sure that once it does go public the feedback hopefully is geared more towards adding features and little things.