If a fire starts it appears to spread with no respect for any fire spread game rules. This occurs even running 0.7.8.

Can you elaborate on how it's violating the rules?

The typical function of the fire spread rule is to allow firespread when enabled and to prevent fire from spreading between blocks when disabled. Even when disabling the rule the dynamic trees allow fire to spread between their blocks.

Hmm. I do derive a custom BlockVerboseFire from minecraft's vanilla BlockFire. I needed to do this because of how the fire doesn't notify anything when it's about to destroy another block with fire. I do however respect the "doFireTick" gamerule just like vanilla fire does. So I'm not sure what could be going wrong.

It appears the rule being used was not the fire tick rule. That appears to have fixed the issue, thanks!