After reading through your email exchange my opinion would be that no, you're not being a jerk. OTOH I fully understand and agree with Ivans decision to verify credit card numbers by checking for a minimum length of 13 characters until there is a real-world case of a valid cc number with less than 13 characters. So if you need a module with your desired behaviour (and it is worth the effort to follow the updates of an upstream module over the years), you probably should fork and create a new module under a different name. Whether that module would be useful enough to upload to CPAN is for you to decide.