Experienced with open source but never seen before a system that is so archaic. Amazing. The way that configuration works is something that has to be seen and experienced to be believed.

There must be strong commercial interest served here to create a system that works in this manner. It allows for configuration changes that corrupt the installation but will now allow manual correction of the configuration. 

Chicken and egg. To correct the configuration you have start OpenLDAP and ldapmodify the config files. But.... OpenLDAP will not start because the configuration is not correct. Really funny. And if you try to manually undo your changes, OpenLDAP will completely refuse to put itself into something that resembles a working configuration.

It is fairly easy to make configuration changes that corrupt the database. Documentation is often incorrect or non-existing. For example try to add sha2 support. Accidentally add non existing hash method will create a corrupt configuration. If you slapd restart it will fail to start. To correct the configuration you need to start slapd. To start slapd you need correct configuration. It is the end of your efforts.

I'm not doing this on a production system of course, I am trying to create a production system where OpenLDAP is on of the many components. So far most of the effort is OpenLDAP effort. It is consuming most of the project budget. A project of a couple of days turns into a project for a couple of weeks.

We just need a LDAP user directory. OpenLDAP is not it.