I'm trying a distro with Connman instead of NetworkMangler. It's the same deal. I could not for the life of me get it to connect or even see my cellphone's wifi tethering hotspot.

I shutdown the connman service and removed it from the auto startup sequence. I manually edited frickin' wpa_supplicant.conf to put my cellphone network there. Worked first time and every time thereafter.

The founding document of GNOME is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" by which the authors (primarily Miguel de Icaza) meant "Let's Make Unix Almost Exactly Like Windows". D-Bus is just the latest in a series of attempts to bring Microsoft's janky, kind of an object model to the realm of Unix's small do-one-thing C programs plumbed together with file descriptors, pipes, and network sockets. Except somehow, they added even more problems on top of the ones COM already had!

At least when Steve Jobs tried to retrofit Smalltalk style OOP onto the Unix model, he had the foresight to bring much of Smalltalk (in the form of Objective-C) along with.