Quadsort's author here.
This is the first time I've heard quadsort being called esoteric. It isn't much more complex than Timsort. It is however challenging to port ~1000 lines of code that can be tedious to debug. If you make one simple error/typo you could be stuck for hours in debugging hell.
Hence I recently published piposort, which is ~150 lines and pretty basic, while still offering excellent performance. Not as good as quadsort, but it could make for a stepping stone in a porting effort.