Being too cautious

I've been dissecting the various layers of the Calculate.activity for the past few hours, trying to find out how little bits of it work, and how to be able to identify different parts of it by label/name/title/whatever, and being able to run a Widget through a method and have it hand me back a useful name (e.g. "9" for a button labelled "9").  However, this is proving to be difficult for some of the non-elementary types (for example, Widgets inside the tabs of a Gtk.Journal; and Gtk.Alignment containers).

Being that I think I spent more time than is necessary at this point, I'm shifting just dealing with buttons for the time being.  By just working with buttons, I can ignore a lot of the crap flying around inside GTK, and lay a framework for extended functionality.  I just feel the need to get something up-and-running that is automated.  I keep getting sidetracked by attempting to implement more than is necessary right now (like handling Gtk.Journal's).  Need to stay focused.