OP here. You're precisely correct, the goal of this project was to demonstrate a PoC of a steganography algorithm which can avoid JPEG recompression and is hence suitable for use in walled gardens such as Facebook.

Also, Chaffinch is a Cambridge project so <sarcasm>naturally not worth integrating with.</sarcasm> But really, this was a single term's undergraduate research project so scope for such integration was thoroughly out of the question.