Comment by rockymeza

I wrote a python app/CLI program for dealing with those couple of programs.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wifi/0.3.1

It works ok and just wraps ifup and iwlist. It also reads and writes /etc/network/interface style config, so you can see what's going on under the hood.

But I agree. Getting it all work the first time (or when I encounter a new type of network) is just ridiculous.