it's weird because it tries to work around the issue of ctrulib not being able to download from HTTPS sites (unless it can). if it could, the "site" folder wouldn't exist and the script would not be downloading from my site. since the starter pack is not behind an HTTPS site, it's much simpler to set up (though you still need to do things like zip extraction and handling multiple files).
the source of my modified lpp-3ds is there. that's not relevant unless you want to see what changes i've made to it. the big part is
https://github.com/ihaveamac/mashers-gl-updater/blob/master/mglupdate/index.lua which is the entire program on the 3DS.