[iends]

You put an interesting spin on reality.

I don't know the exact history of node-forward, but node-forward/node was only a piece of the node-forward repository. Early on it was my impression was that node-forward was just about collecting pain points in the node ecosystem and working towards those pain points (technical or not). The fork came later.

The fork threats you mention don't seem to have anything to do with node-forward. In addition, the article clearly states that "Roth told VentureBeat his company does not intend to fork Node" so these fork threats were not reality.

As for why they didn't rename node-forward/node? Well the previously linked article explains it quite well "We agreed to make the repository private in order to show our commitment to working with Joyent on improving Node.js."