DesignGears is the guy behind several roms that were based on stock, going as far back as Cognition for the Captivate.
He is also, I believe the person who posted the stock recovery images for the Samsung Captivate and came up with the mechanism for recovering the Captivate to stock.
I ran his rom (Cognition) on my Samsung Captivate for at least a year, updating as he released new versions until he stopped development on Froyo and jumped to Gingerbread, around this time, Cyanogen began development and I used Cyanogen instead of Cognition because they supported the Froyo bootloaders, his rom did not after he went to Gingerbread (it required updating the bootloaders).
I even remember a short dialog where I pushed to use the Pacman script from Cyanogen in order to both make his rom download smaller but also so that users had more of a choice as to what apps they wanted on their phone.
DesignGears (DG for short) is one of the key developers that got the Captivate rom development off the ground. While Im sure someone else would have gotten around to it, he is the guy who kicked it off and figured it all out. Dont dis' the guy, if he has a Note and begins development, my hope is that we will start to see more development for the Note. At only three custom roms, all heavily based on stock, we have yet to really see this phone at its full potential.