Inside the Papervision3D source, besides existing an AS2 and AS3 version, there are five derivate branches: MaterialsRestructor, Phunky, ascollada, frustrum and timk_frustum. I decided to research a bit about each one and write about what I founded..
The most important of these branches is the one called Phunky. It is the branch that will soon became the 2.0 version of Papervision3D, which in the SVN trunk is now tagged Beta 1.7 (dated 20.08.07). So, if you're using trunk, you should expect only bug-fixes. It's a bit different from other open-source projects where trunk normally means the latest revision of the project. For Papervision3D, you can think of trunk as a stable version (whatever that means for a software that's in Beta).
Someone said on the list that "switching from trunk to Phunky shouldn't break anything (doesn't impinge on the API) but should net you a performance increase".
MaterialsRestructor was a branch created to test code regarding Materials. Once changes are tested the most likely is that they go into trunk or Phunky.
I don't know much about the 'ascollada' branch besides the fact that it was created by Tim Knip and that he tries to maintain it in sync with ascollada, a actionscript library for parsing COLLADA files. I've tested loading some COLLADA files with Beta 1.7 and it works fine so I don't have the need to use this branch yet but Ivan is using it (the DEA class), so he might have something to add here.
The 'frustum' (definition) branch has a 'BVH mocap importer class' with a beautiful sample here, but I was unable to find the real purpose of this branch. You can check the examples folder for the sample sources.
'timk_frustum' is a branch that appeared when Tim Knip put up for testing a new FrustumCamera3D, in early August 2007. This class is now also at the 'frustum' branch.
And that's it. If you know more about this and want to share please do. Thanks.
Update: John Grden posted a comment explaining a bit more about the branches, thanks!