My point wasn't really about HFS. All the filesystem-specific code will need to be adapted to changes in both hardware and in the target filesystems. What's going on here should make you question whether you really want to use gparted to resize partitions on new disks going forward. For my part, if a disk utility claims to work with my hardware, then it had better be tight.

My advice to you is to stick with the older versions of gparted.