Oh someone has re-adopted the original (better, though occasionally slower) parinfer! It can be found here: https://github.com/kisaragi-hiu/parinfer-mode
FYI - there was a sweet performance-improving PR to parinfer-elisp from that author / project: https://github.com/oakmac/parinfer-elisp/pull/14
Yup! With a bit of work I got his fork running. Looking forward to the next time I get a chance to do some coding!
Here's hoping for less emacs crashes and less random junk inserted into my files while I'm trying to parinfer!