A pity, but hopefully not in vain!

It's a pity to hear about such a well-regarded open source project ending.

But hopefully all of the hard work in producing a polished LiveCD won't be in vain.  My
thinking is that Parted Magic may have failed, in part, because there are similar
distributions which do many more tasks, and do these particular ones almost as well.

I'm thinking of SystemRescueCD, which includes all kinds of password utilities, disk wipers,
BIOS inspection tools, network tweaking tools, etc... in addition to a similar set of
Partitioning software.

While SystemRescueCD is highly useful, it isn't perfect... it lacks the kind of polish and
cohesive integration that you describe in Parted Magic.  

Perhaps SystemRescueCD can adopt some of what makes Parted Magic so great, including the
custom patches and slick interface that you described.  That would be a great example of open
source code outliving the original project that created it, and making itself useful to a
wider audience.