I am one of those few who have to watch for false hubris more than false laziness, so this is what I'd want to do:

Patch the module to clean up the internals, and add hooks - whether that be subclassability, slots for user-supplied callbacks or whatever else may seem appropriate -, and of course submit the patch back to the author. Then I'd use the well-defined interface I just created to add my own, case-specific functionality inside my application.

Hopefully the author will either accept the patch or be inspired - and so whoever next needs something like me will also benefit.

Makeshifts last the longest.