A few problems

[agent_kith]

i have set both the nas and the snakeoil machines to static. 
mpd works fine, and sounds absolutely fantastic.
i really just want to get tidal working, whether its with minimserver, using umpdpcli or through lms.

Hopefully you can try out upmpdcli with mpd with the new 1.2.2 update. That might get things going, or let me know where the underlying problem is.

lms never sounds as good as mpd, though i know you cant use mpd for tidal

Agreed. OTOH, MPD is too revealing making about 90% of my music un-listenable. lol. I blame the music producers for this. There's actually a lot of good music around, but they are just so poorly recorded and produced.

i could install either snakeoil or daphile onto a thin client and see what it does.
how big is the snakeoil os when installed? 
mpd is on port 8080 kodi is on port 808, lms is on 9000

Snakeoil OS sits on top of Ubuntu OS. And Ubuntu OS can be as little or as bloated as you want to be.

Snakeoil OS Is very tweakable, hackable and adaptable. Most other softwares don't give this flexibility. Unfortunately with this flexibility things are easily broken, which I'm trying my best to fix. Unfortunately this project isn't my full time job so the time I can dedicate to this is pretty limited. Having said that, things will improve in the future, with the release of 1.2.2, kernel builder, and with the code being open sourced out. The plan is there, and it will happen in time.

Meanwhile, there are still other audiophile questions that I'm pondering on. Streaming music over CIFS vs NFS ... <- Now I could have swore I prefer CIFS over NFS. This doesn't mean CIFS gives better audio quality over NFS, just means I enjoy my music more when I use CIFS. Pondering this is also stealing time from development because I'm spending time listening/evaluating music. And also spending money and even more time building a new NAS server so I can easier ponder this.

Basically a lot of things to do, very little free time to execute.