I have finally got round to releasing my MBR and ext2 VBR to the public domain They can be found on GitHub. Comments and suggestions welcome!
One of my hopes in doing this is that newbies have a lighter weight option than GRUB if they don't want to start with rolling their own bootloader. I don't think this project is there yet, as this bootloader loads inode 5 (the bootloader inode) of an ext2 filesystem, and putting your boot code there is a slightly arcane process.