Got EXWM in a nice looking and very usable state:
Major victory of the day was setting up MPD and using qjoypad to map the X and A gamepad buttons on this device to the pause and print buttons, and in init.el mapping those to toggle pause/play of current song and next song respectively.
I have 2 Samsung 3500mAh 18650s powering this device and it has taken 6 hours to get to 50% battery capacity. This little computer is exceding my expectations. Keep in mind I am not doing anything heavy on it, YMMV.