Ah, a Mac. I don't have one, so I can't really test, but according to my research MacOS restricts OpenGL context to 2.1 unless explicitly told otherwise. I'm not sure what GL context Starsector is using on Mac, but I've attached a jar file that will test this.
Replace Particle Engine/jars/ParticleEngine.jar with the attached file (make sure to backup the original jar) and boot up the game with Particle Engine enabled. It should crash immediately with a message stating which GL versions the game's context supports.
If your context supports 3.2 but not 3.3, I think this should be easily fixable with a version switch from 330 to 150. But, if you're stuck at 2.1 I'm not sure there's much I can do about it -- the required context capabilities would need to be requested before the window is created, which isn't something that a mod would be capable of altering.