Having worked at HP on the MSA1500 and MSA2000 software, I will just note that hateful as ACUCLI is (and you have only scratched the surface) it's small potatoes compared to some of the stuff we had to deal with internally. Let's just say that this stuff is the result of many dedicated UNIX-smart people fighting a never-ending battle against the folks who think only Windows is worth supporting.
I can't talk about this stuff, though. It's still too raw. I will say that for monitoring HP do indeed have another tool. Currently it is still queriable via SNMP, but they're really pushing to switch everything over to SMI-S. Don't ask. If you know, I can't say anything that will help. If you don't know, be happy.
