Indeed. I've experimented a bit with abusing DD/DBSP for my purposes by modeling various kinds of data structures in terms of Z-sets, but these efforts have not yielded very impressive results. :)
For how elegant DBSP is I still found the paper a tough nut to crack, and it really is one of the more accessible theoretical contributions in the space, at least from this grubby programmer's perspective... I hope to devote some time to study and play around more, but in the meantime I'm rooting for you!