Nobody "knows how" when it comes to Palm. If you are doing anything for Palm platform, you have to hack your way through, you learn every moment, new incompatibilities, new bugs, it doesn't come on a golden plate as many are undocumented, it must be learned through the process, no one knows who didn't go through it. And once you know it all, new model comes and again you know nothing and have to hack your way through it.
That Slaven, or Jim, decided not to go through it to the end, is an easy calculation to me: it would bring a negligible if any increase in sales in Barca, while taking way too many developer hours.
At the time in the past when I was subscribed to a non-public Palm developers discussion group, some dedicated Palm programmers left the platform or threatened to, because of bugs in Palm implementations, incompatibilities introduced with every other model, and no clear future (one was almost tempted to say "no future") of Palm platform.
These were people who have drawn 100% of their income from Palm software.
Barca doesn't, Palm sync is just extra, and I wonder if having Palm sync would increase Barca sales even by 1%. It's true every now and then someone asks for a Palm sync, but it's just a tiny drop in the sea of users.
My Palm is covered by dust, as developers of software I rely on nowadays on Windows, mostly decided to not even bother by Palm and if anything only consider Windows mobile platform in their plans. Sad.