Sorry for the delay. I was on vacation basically since you posted this question.
It’s possible to dance around the Mozilla stuff for the most part but at some point you will hit some code where you’ll need to dig into XUL or XPCOM. I’d say the best way to go about this is to dive in and ask lots of questions when you need to. I will be in the forums daily to answer questions (assuming I’m not on vacation…which i won’t be for a while now).