I humbly stand corrected. Dead WAS a bad choice of words.
I think Dormant may have been a better choice of wording at the time.
I am assuming it is it a simple case of limited resources.
While its younger sibling V2 grows up to be big and strong,
V1 can expect to live a long life, maintained with care, yet but a few enhancements will ever fall its way.
If I was to take some time and make some hacks, would there be any interest ?
Or has interest in V1 fallen off to the point where no one would care ?
I have always liked the fact V1 was self contained and only needed PHP to run.
Except for having to delete and rename directories once in a while (which I will fix) V1
did most of what I wanted and needed.
I did make a paypal hack a few years back, the code it parsed a user supplied data field *paypal* to build a pulldown box and worked ok.
IE: (Postcard - $1.00 : 8x10 - $2.00 : Color - $3.00) in *paypal* would generate a pulldown based on the listed choices.
If *paypal* was not found and a data field "Price:" was then a single submit using that price was used.
I got it working with the paypal checkout but never merged it back in to your newer code.
I went the ebay store route just about the time V2 was under way.
I am now just looking back at gallery v1 as a nice tool for documenting collections that can be hosted and backed up just about anywhere.
I am looking to build a simple gallery based solution for documenting personal collections that is a cross between a Blog and Gallery V1. Without this documentation effort, my family will remain clueless forever, about what is junk, and what is not, and in many cases I do not even know, yet 
I would be willing to make a fresh round of hacks to your the latest greatest v1 and document them if there is interest. I am not even sure if you accept hacks from outsiders ? I should go back and RTFM before I post, na life is too short these days 