Unfortunately it's a pretty manual, tedious and frustrating process, especially when the code is minified and you want to squeeze it into as small a source file as possible.

Gratifying to read the author say that creating something as mind-boggling this was tedious and frustrating.

It's great, by the way :)

A generic (pseudo) quine is:

   s = "print escape(s)\n{payload}"
   print "s = "
   print escape(s)
   {payload}

So if you wanna do extra stuff on top of being a quine, just write that program and bootstrap with escape()

We don’t do this, that and the other thing because they are easy, we do it because they are hard.

The tedium is part of the difficulty. Making it easier is not inspirational. Although buildings the tooling to do so would itself be quite the challenge ...

Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleene's_recursion_theorem

Thanks for the reference.