thesis help

[cm]

Greetings,

I am hoping to typeset my PhD thesis in troff.  I have found some
modern resources about writing a thesis with mom, but out of personal
interest I want to try using a more traditional macro package.

Initially, I tried using an mm template for "external papers" from
Gehani [0], p. 306.  Here is a stripped-down version:

.SA 1
.FD 1
.ND "m, d, y"
.TL
Title of Paper
.AU "N. H. Gehani" NHG
.AS 1
Abstract...
.AE
.MT 4 1
.H 1 Introduction
Text...
.H 1 Conclusions
Conclusion...
.H 1 Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement...
.SG nhg
.NS 3
References
.NE
.SK
.H 1 References
.VL 1.5i 0.5i
.LI ref-mark
reference...
.LE
.CS

I tried compiling this with groff, Heirloom troff, and 9base troff.
Heirloom and 9base pretty much match what's in the book, but the cover
sheet is at the end and the Heirloom version has an extra blank page.
This could be fixed by rearranging the pages with ghostscript after
compiling, but if there is a better way I would like to know it.

The groff output diverges from the book significantly: There is a page
number header at the top of the first page and there is some extra
stuff after "Acknowledgement..." which looks like this:

        NHG-nhg                 N. H. Gehani

        Att.
        References

Anyone know what would account for this difference between groff and
Heirloom/9base?  What would be a good way to make groff behave like
the other two?

I am not set on mm, but I would like the document to compile on
different systems without depending on a particular troff
implementation; groff seems to be the most ubiquitous.

I also came across this "thesis.me" setup for me macros [1], and I'm
curious how this would have been used.  Were students intended to copy
this and use it as a base for their document, compiling with
"troff -me"?  Or would they include the contents of thesis.me using
some command line option or troff command?  Just want to be sure I'm
not missing something subtle or interesting here.

Using troff for my thesis isn't just a means to an end; I'm kind of
using it as an excuse to do a mini historical research project.  It
would be cool to reconstruct how a thesis might have been typeset in
the 80s, while addressing practical concerns like compatibility with
modern groff.  Besides the questions above, if anyone has any general
advice or suggestions I'm all ears!

CM

[0] N. H. Gehani, Document Formatting and Typesetting on the UNIX System, 
Silicon Press, 1987
[1] https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=3BSD/usr/lib/me/src/thesis.me