There's nothing stopping you using some parts of the Mer userland tools and implementing a light weight GUI on top. I'm currently playing with it (repackaged for Debian Jessie) to look at feasibility of updated Maemo/Hildon GTK3. Mer/Nemo MCE still has a legacy package for LED control etc. statefs is a little bit trickier as it requires Qt5 IIRC so may present a few issues in terms of performance but may actually solve some of the issues in Maemo port (eg xcb).