Further Sabayon tribulations

Got Compiz-Fusion (fusion-icon) working well for a short time today on Sabayon. The principle breakthrough was what I learnt in this post.
Then I went about getting AWN to work (actually AWN seemed to work but had a lot of trouble getting AWN-manager to work -- seemed it was missing some dependencies from here).
However, then I found that CF didn't work too well (clicking on fusion-icon didn't allow choosing any items).
The I rebooted to see if it would come back but it didn't load at boot. So I tried running fusion-icon in a terminal but it wouldn't start complaining that PyQt4 and Qt were missing.
Actually, during what I learned today about Sabayon, a World Update is a very bad idea for inexperienced users (which I am) and I think I did one of these while messing around with Kuroo (or was it Portato?).
So given that things aren't going so well now (although it was starting to look very, very well), I think I'm going to do yet another clean install (/ and /home) and take a lot more time about getting things up and running.
Certainly, I'm getting the distinct impression that sabayon in nothing like Ubuntu for simplicity.
Edit: I've just finished trying to emerge PyQt4 (which took quite some time). But even after this, fusion-icon still complains about missing all interfaces (including Qt4, Qt3, qt, compizconfig).
So, it really looks like my Sabayon is terminally ill and it's time to put it out of its misery and start again.
So that's the big task for tomorrow.