Rather than forking elm, there's purescript, which is unlike elm in all the restrictive ways. It seems to have regular releases and plenty of packages as well.
Or port over to bucklescript-tea (a port of the Elm architecture to the OCaml-to-JS compiler BuckleScript) using the Philip2 migration tool, which was announced almost a year before OP was published: https://medium.com/darklang/philip2-an-elm-to-reasonml-compi...