I don't know what the future holds for live-build. Someone who follows the debian-live mailing list would have a better idea. There's also the open-infrastructure project, which is run by Daniel Baumann. Packages are in ascii, and when I looked at it about a year ago, only one of the packages needed to have its dependencies changed (remove systemd dep) to install in devuan. It is a continuation of live-build under a different name and with the same commands.

Note that live-boot and live-config, which are part of the original debian-live project, are needed for refracta tools and for live-sdk to make a bootable live-iso. They better not go away any time soon.

libdevuansdk and live-sdk are being developed in devuan and are already in use for building the desktop-live isos and the embedded-device images.

It's not practical to remove or replace the debian installer. It's capable of doing too many things to get rid of it. Personally, I hate it, but sometimes it's the best tool for the job.

The refracta tools will continue to be included in the live isos. If development stops on those, someone else could pick it up. It's a really simple procedure. For the installer - create partition, rsync copy the live system to the partition, add the bootloader. And for the record, I'm not planning to stop maintaining those tools, because I intend to continue using them even if nobody else wants to.

The plan for the live isos is to include the debian/devuan installer. Ozi is working on that, and I think it will be included whenever we get around to making a point release of jessie.

Sorry I can't help with your install problem. I think it would be good if it got solved, and I hope that live-build or its successor will continue to work in devuan. Diversity is a good thing for the ecosystem.

Are the refracta tools going to be the de-facto official devuan system building tools with the debian installer being considered deprecated? If i'm switching my distribution's base, i prefer to use the tools used that are officially supported for the new distribution base; since those are the tools that are supported for the long term and will perform better than the short term use tools that will eventually no longer be supported.

An answer to my devuan debian installer mystery would be nice except...an answer doesn't matter if the debian installer isn't going to be in use much longer for devuan.