Apologies for the delayed response. I couldn't get to this until now due to competing priorities.
TLDR: The forks aren't going away. We likely will address the scoped storage requirement, but not necessarily the same way as mainline Collect.
What meaning does the "now" in "now forked" have? The fork of openhds tablet happened circa-2015 and the fork of collect only just happened within the last few months. They are also very different in nature.
After working with original team from the University of Southern Maine, I eventually took over development of their existing fork of openhds for the same project on Bioko Island. I just "production"-ized it by giving it a home, branding it, and fixing its major flaws to function for its intended purpose (which was not the same as openhds). There wasn't an active online openhds development community to integrate back to, and many of the changes that needed to happen were not clear conceptual fits with a demographic surveillance system. To my knowledge, it is the only actively developed fork of that project, including the original.
The collect fork happened for different reasons. Mainly, instability of updates from Google Play kept breaking our daily operation of around 50-100 devices. However, I had been reluctantly considering the need prior to that, for similar reasons to the openhds fork: its purpose is not really the same as collect. Many features that would not make sense in Collect (as it exists today) make perfect sense for the fork. For that reason I don't see it going away, at least until the project does. However, we want to track as closely with mainline as possible, both to keep maintenance reasonable, as well as to continue to benefit from all of the great work the ODK community is doing.
Yes, we will likely be adressing the scoped storage requirement for CIMS Forms within the next couple of weeks. We are interested in a Collect solution, but don't expect direct support of any kind (including expedited delivery of an api) from the ODK community. This will likely be bundled with changes to way the apps integrate, since the Collect model had some undesirable quirks that we will want to address.
I can't speak to Project Buendia, but we are not solely tracking patients. We actually track households and inhabitants on Bioko Island for accurate coverage reporting and other metrics. We also have plans on expanding that support to track arbitrary entities, since different organizational units want to leverage the same shared database during inital data collection for easier analytics downstream. For example, tracking bednets, informal drug dispensaries, private clinics, etc.
Happy to expand on or clarify any of this if anyone is interested.