Your alternate implementation would have to monkey patch the shipped code. That is a fork in disguise.
Not to repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38604600
The easiest way to produce a monkey patch for Emacs which reverts some behavior would be to maintain your own private fork of the repo, where you do a proper job of rebasing, resolving conflicts and validating. Then from that you take the necessary files (all the files that are different from upstream) and produce the hot-load that can be distributed to people. But, totally not a fork, man!
