I guess he means that we need more 'empty' elements like 'bran', so we have more new element 'slots' to script, since we can't create new elements with lua.
I think a better way would be to raise PT_NUM without adding an real elements, and then adding lua functions to get the next empty slot and put the new element there. What I would like better though, is that you can create new elements based off of other ones, with all the same properties and reactions. That would be kind of hard to get to work right.