Regarding one of the goals of 'st,' would the suckless crowd be interested in resolving the current admitted shortcomings of 'st' by rolling in a fairly tiny library called libvterm (bzr repo at http://bazaar.leonerd.org.uk/c/libvterm) by Paul 'Leonerd' Evans (http://www.leonerd.org.uk) for handling terminal parsing? I know that the philosophy of suckless is to generally avoid unnecessary code, but in this case libvterm has encapsulated a lot of knowledge about terminal behavior that would prevent a large amount of duplication of effort. I currently use it in a toy project called x86term (https://github.com/pkovac/x86term) which implements a terminal emulator on bare x86 iron, the binary size hasn't gotten too large, and libvterm allowed me to basically immediately bring it to a usable state once the barebones needed were in place. If any of this interests the suckless community, the author of libvterm and myself both have interest in porting 'st' to it.
Sincerely, Philip Kovac