Ah, I thought bfgminer was a fork with cosmetic changes, my mistake. I will go back to cgminer and try again. Thanks.
Most forks begin with cosmetic changes

But this one was made because Luke had a different approach on FPGA support so it most probably quickly diverged (didn't check the changesets myself but saw comments on them that strongly suggest it).
There should still be lots of common code, but each project has a life of its own.