I've been changing this service back and forth and back again, now running on one computer, and leaving aside all confusion you will see in there, gnunet needs at least a .config/gnunet file, the rest should be automatically created. unless it isn't, which was the case here. And all shepherd gives me on the computer where I run the branch is: starting service gnunet. couldn't start service gnunet.
Looking at the logs I can get, I saw nothing obvious. I have no logs appended but the patch. If you want to clean it up first feel free to comment on that, this is straight imported from the WIP branch on the other computer. The config is hardcoded because I just need to get it to work for now.