As a followup, I am about to begin work to make the MobileFrontend less WMF-centric. I've created two bugs to track the work - please let me know if there are other areas that could use some de-WMF-ification:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34145 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34144