I commented the wlan related lines in /etc/network/interfaces
and made a reboot.
Still no grub, still having a delay.
Once booted, I tried your suggestion, and I'm still stuck at sudo dhclient.
after a minute or two, I still have no wifi up. I'll uncomment back my
interfaces file now.
However, wicd-ncurses seems interesting.
I mean I like the wpa_supplican't text-based wifi management, but I have no
idea about how to manage more than one network.
I think I'll quickly document what I need to do from scratch, and reinstall
the whole thing again. I'll start to try and fix grub if needed.
Just before that, I want to really master wifi networking.
Maybe too much minimalism/optimization is counterproductive.
Depending on its size, a simpler GUI interface might be better, specially for
joining a new network.'ll try network-manager