Okay, I'm better now. After a good weekend of working on my motorcycle, and a little bit of riding (not much, as I spent the sunshine replacing the starter relay-- it started raining once the bike was fixed, of course), I feel refreshed, and ready to take on the world. Or, at least, the maze of gnome dependencies.
It's really not that bad, after all. popt had problems on Solaris, but I found a precompiled version on sunfreeware.com, sidestepping that issue. I found the ORBit-martin-forked repository, just like it tells me in the oaf README file. So the operator headspace was mine, in this instance. I reckon that means I should take it easier when a user has some headspace issues.
I just don't want to contribute to Gnome's undeserved bad rep.