You may be interested in something like https://github.com/tailhook/quick-error. It lets you easily implement From traits for errors so that you can convert between error types.
An interesting point here is that Wikipedia actually works in China, only some articles are censored. I tried to bypass this by typing https://www.wikipedia.org into the browser, but it loaded the http version regardless.
I've been running Crunchbang for two years. It is the only distro that had working media buttons, multi touch trackpad, close lid -> sleep working out of the box on my T420. Not sure if any of this changed but all the other distros I tried required me to write config files and bash scripts. Sad to see it go.
Using VPNs are becoming increasingly difficult too. All the large VPN services are blocked here; OpenVPN doesn't work; the only option left is to use unknown services which are not guaranteed to be genuine.
I don't know if this happens often but I would like to take a moment and point out that after hearing a strong negative reaponse, It's nice to see that the developer is willing to work through the problems with the community to change his/her project to a better state.