I also was impressed by the way that the CGtalk community reacted positively to his coding efforts. It's not a normal thing to see a coder post their work to a cg gallery. I think that it was a great idea to post there and express the creative side of a cg coding project.
Rune is a very well known contributor to the POV-Ray community. He committed excellent codes, in particular an excellent Particles system. He is too much oriented toward POV-Ray I'm not sure he will join the Blender community...
Since blender has a povray exporter (povanim by jms) and is completely willing to collaborate with other free software (at least I beleive so) maybe some of the project gurus could get to contact Rune, it could be worth trying, "je dirais même plus" not trying would be the worst solution...