Finally had some time to look into this, only seeing two options a custom backend script(s) based off wpa_supplicant, potentially an extension of the current WiFi manager or wicd. So i got wicd running wicd-cli and mostly working wicd-curses (crashes a little). More testing to be done like wifi hand off and fstab not always mounting /sd and removing bloat build directory is 30MB+ plus the opkg installs. Will reset and try a cleaner install after some testing.
Running on boot with rc.d
wicd-1.7.2.4 + revision 835 curses_misc.py
urwid-1.2.1
dbus-python
dbus
dbus-utils
python-gobject
python-ncurses
net-tools-route
babel-1.3 (probably not needed, if English only on urwid)
setuptools-5.4 (not needed if babel isn't)