> > Furthermore, if I feed it with my actual 'init.el' - which defines a user-init-file emacs "custom.el" can play with 
> > under user-emacs-directory - I come up with: 
> > 
> > Cannot open file file: No such file or directory, ~/.emacs.d/custom.el 
> > 
> > in the minibuffer. 
> 
> I cannot look into this without seeing a minimal init.el file that 
> causes this. In particular, I need to understand how come your 
> init.el file uses ~/.emacs.d when your user-emacs-directory is 
> different. 

This is entirely my fault. My real init.el won't touch user-emacs-directory unless some environment variable is not set, which I removed during the test. Please accept my apologies. 

However, this does not affect the primary test "please-do-it.el".