Reverse Bounty: Affiliates 5.x Improvements / Backport

I am posting a $200 reverse bounty to backport the 6.x improvements made in the Affiliates module (http://www.drupal.org/project/affiliates). There have been several changes to the 6.x version, but the changes have not made it back to 5.x. Once there is sponsorship for the $200 bounty, I will implement the following changes in a backport:

http://drupal.org/node/336656 - # Highest climbers (which affiliates are referring more than they did before )
# Additional UI for adding/editing/deleting categories
# Allow the possibility of circumventing writing to the affiliates tables for the case when affiliate referrals are being
collected by parsing apache logs ( a colleague has a working perl script that can do exactly this )
# Show affiliate banners on the list / edit pages

http://drupal.org/node/507346 - #Spam settings (block by referrer uri, user, and ip)

http://drupal.org/node/357813 - #Cookie storing for the referral module

http://drupal.org/node/100042 - #Total refactoring of the points integration (including userpoints)

http://drupal.org/node/427868 - #Affiliate points on the user profile page

http://drupal.org/node/409114 - #new permission: 'affiliates view'

http://drupal.org/node/360714 - #text links

http://drupal.org/node/384544 - #Database field changes

http://drupal.org/node/359367 - #cron changes

I was asked to do this to see if there is community support to get these changes brought into 5.x - hopefully there is.

Thanks in advance for your support,
Bryan O'Shea
Obsidian Design