[BLISS ROMS Development] KKJdrunkenmonkey:
I'm willing to put in the time. The problem is that I'm not very familiar with Android, so I'm not sure where to start. Totally willing to struggle a bit as long there is actually a path that will get me there. Just to be clear: Although there's a lot of information below I'm only asking for guidance, NOT for someone to do it for me. And I'm happy to write up my notes on what worked and post them somewhere, assuming I get there.

I first went through the GApps install script and wrote out what I thought it was doing, then translated that into commands which are listed below. Not much to it, really, mostly just getting the right apks into the right folder as far as I could tell. Which is probably wrong considering that I failed - as I mentioned, there was a Google installer/configuration thing that seemed to have taken over for Taskbar as my home, it continually crashed to the point that I couldn't even get into the Android configuration screens to change it. Figuring that there's something about manually installing the packages by copying them to the appropriate folder which I had missed, I did some more Googling and someone suggested letting Android itself install them. So I used a root terminal to try it but package manager said that the apps did not appear to be v2 signed correctly. At this point I'm not sure which of these two paths is the better to go down for troubleshooting, thoughts?

Here are the steps I used to manually install, along with commented out notes. I did keep swype as it seemed like it might be convenient later, otherwise I ignored everything optional.

#To avoid problems I used the smallest package, the Open GApps "pico".

sudo find -name "app" -type d -exec cp -r {} /mnt/Shared/sys/ \;

sudo find -name "priv-app" -type d -exec cp -r {} /mnt/Shared/sys/ \;

#Pick one, for the Surface I went with tablet. This ensures the one copied above is overwritten.

sudo find -name "setupwizardtablet-all" -type d -exec cp -r {}/nodpi/priv-app /mnt/Shared/sys/ \;

#sudo find -name "setupwizarddefault-all" -type d -exec cp -r {}/nodpi/priv-app /mnt/Shared/sys/ \;

#There are some supporting files which I assume need to be copied

sudo find -name "etc" -type d -exec cp -r {} /mnt/Shared/sys/ \;

sudo find -name "framework" -type d -exec cp -r {} /mnt/Shared/sys/ \;

#If swype installed, according to the installer script these two symlinks are needed - modified version below

# ln -sfn "/system/$libfolder/$keybd_lib_google" "/system/app/LatinIME/$libfolder/$arch/$keybd_lib_target" # create required symlink

# ln -sfn "/system/$libfolder/$keybd_dec_google" "/system/app/LatinIME/$libfolder/$arch/$keybd_dec_google" # create required symlink

#Here is what I used. lib64 didn't exist, though the script implied that it should - does it matter?

sudo ln -sfn "/mnt/Shared/sys/lib64/libjni_latinimegoogle.so" "/mnt/Shared/sys/app/LatinIME/lib/x86_64/libjni_latinimegoogle.so"

sudo ln -sfn "/mnt/Shared/sys/lib64/libjni_latinimegoogle.so" "/mnt/Shared/sys/app/LatinIME/lib/x86_64/libjni_keyboarddecoder.so"

# Skipping Google Assistant commands

# Skipping "Google Play Services as error reporting service" commands

# What the heck is pittpatt? Doesn't exist in my system/vendor.

# Unmount file system so it can be repacked into sfs