I agree. Having to continuously update for nightlies that don't even affect the functions of the mod has to get old after a while. Unfortunately, merging it with the build might would take some of the creative freedom of the mod out of Shoes' hands.
Shoes can still do whatever maintenance he wants before and after the mod's integrated, it's open-source. If it makes it simpler, he can always just keep his Commendation Medals as a separate mod, while the stats part is integrated into the main game, so it just becomes a regular ruleset mod like all the others.
The main delays in integrating are:
1. From this thread's recent posts, there are still issues to work out.
2. His changes involve over 5000 changed lines of code (much bigger than your typical PR) that have to be carefully reviewed to make sure they don't cause any problems to existing players.