It's sad that they didn't just tack onto an existing project like Pinax and add functionality to it to handle the federated system. There was no need to reinvent the wheel, the existing ones just needed a little truing.
I had a really good look at that and I did not like much what I saw (that was a while ago, but still). Do you have a specific reason for suggesting that over appleseed (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), which I think would be a far better fit?