Magnolia runtime is a different-ish paper server fork for following reasons:

• Instead of patching server code directly everything will be gradually moved overt to magnolia-core module that does not require patches for changes
• Bukkit, Spigot and Paper APIs will be gradually deprecated and their new replacement will be implemented in magnolia-api module that again does not require patches for changing things
• API changes will break things, there will be no support for plugin compatability

You can consider this as a hard fork, patches from paper will still be included but don't count on every single one

For the long term goal:

• Completely get rid of Spigot dependency, reasoning here is I don't want to depend on md_5 and as we are not planning on supporting their plugins this should not be that big of a problem?
• This is a personal long term goal, but maybe you are willing to help; learn how paperweight works in depth, right now I have a high level understanding what and how it works, but I need to know more

Special thanks

Kristjan Krušič - For obvious reasons.