I gave up because I couldn't see a way to make the program consistent. The path issues were the most immediate concern, yes, but not the only one. I really wanted a consistent UI because there are few things that irritate me more than UI layouts switching up on me, but I just couldn't see a way of doing that. For example, OpenRC stores the complete description of service definitions in 2 separate files, one of which is optional. You have a shell script that contains the code to run in /etc/init.d, but you also have a config file that describes the environment that code is ran in in /etc/conf.d. If I wanted to have services be editable live in the GUI (and that was one of the main features I wanted out of it), I would have had to split the text editor into two panes for OpenRC.

Overall, I guess this is a kind of perfectionism or choice paralysis I guess. I have continued to write Haskell since, and am now comfortable with the base language, if not the ecosystem (I have no idea what a lens is).

[stares awkwardly in Haskell]

I often have to remind myself that we have the programs we have today only because somebody wanted them to exist more than they wanted them to express abstract properties like consistency.