Having considered the branchport to Quest:1 some more, I'm less certain it's worth the wish for the Eye, compared to doing a drowning deathwarp via eg. scroll of flood, or nearby water on the Tourist/Healer quest. Comparing the sequence of actions
Branchport version
* Wish for the Eye
* Enter Quest:1 to get the option to branchport there
* Leave Quest:1
* Branchport adjacent to Quest Leader
Deathwarp version
* Pick up amulet of life saving (perhaps in 0 actions via autopickup)
* Put on amulet of life saving
* Enter Quest:1
* Read scroll of flood/jump over water (last action of the turn)
* Polymorph from air elemental to non-flying form, safe_teleds adjacent to Quest Leader
* Polymorph back to air elemental
(possibly 2 more actions if loadstones/inventory stashing are necessary)
So it seems like a toss-up, especially considering the limited availability of wishes for magical items in Un. Intuitively I'd say the deathwarp version is preferable in all but the most optimal run. The wish is likely better spent on some other essential item that it otherwise takes more actions to obtain than on a single-use branchport saving 1-4 actions.
Re: the nethack-tas-tools, I skimmed through the files. Currently I lack access to a machine capable of hardware-assisted virtualization, so can't use the qemu-kvm part of the rerecording framework. I toyed with using dmtcp for the application checkpointing part, criu/lxc is another option (lxc recently got checkpointing capability). This is all less general/portable than the qemu-kvm approach but will hopefully let me churn out another quick run before the lack of reseeding gets patched out for Junethack. The pexpect stuff will be useful, for manipulating teleports, wishes, polypiling, etc.
The modified NetHack looks neat, though it's beyond my current abilities to port the changes over to UnNetHack. I don't think there's any pressing need to finish a close-to-optimal TAS of UnNetHack. The routes for NetHack variants with the frame rule removed are going to look fairly alike (as long as you're collecting the same McGuffins). One TAS would probably suffice across all such variants. Then, it's best to choose the variant that is easiest to work with or that has the most interesting differences.