Do you plan to open-source your changes so that anyone can provide bugfixes?
Also, how would we flash the resulting ESP8266_XRST.bin to the chip, i.e. at which address should it be loaded with esptool?
Edit: Ah okay, so you basically just have to pull GPIO0 to GND and run esptool.py like this:
esptool.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0x0 ESP8266_XRST.bin
Then disconnect GPIO0 and reset the ESP and it'll boot the new version