Dear Kenneth,
At the time we release OpenACS 5.9.1, the installation should be more smooth as it is currently. Our plan is as well to provide a bootstrap theme for DotLRN, which is mostly finished now, to improve the mobile experience via an responsive interface for DotLRN.
In general, all OpenACS packages should be usable in an DotLRN installation, some of these have applets+portlets, some of these do not have it. In general, the (about 90) packages in the oacs-5-9 channel are recommended, since these are maintained. Other packages might work as well, some of these can be used as starting points for new projects.
I would love to see the packages of ]ProjectOpen[ working with OpenACS installations, since the communities can benefit from each other. I've sent a few years ago some patches for the core packages of po to frank, to make po installable from scratch (i.e. without db-dump). This would be a first step to ease the integration. There is willingness for this in the po world, but i guess, often there are not enough resources.
We have as well plans to release our own e-learning components, but this will as well take some more time. We have now upgraded most code to oacs-5-9 level, there is some hope that we can publish some components next year.