Ah, I didn't realize we were enforcing that.  I knew, of course, that adding public didn't actually change anything functionally - I was just doing it to follow Kohana convention.

I think I've done it in a few more places, too... want me to rip them out?

On that same note, another thing Kohana never does is use private - everything is public or protected.  Of course, this is helpful for extensibility.  Would it make sense to change our instances of private to protected as well?