Wow. When you say "rare", you ain't kidding. I can't find any mention of a "Buslink" brand in the LIRC archive or the hifi-remotes site. The Buslink company does have a website, but nothing there describes them ever producing TVs, and all links to Buslink TV product or support pages on their site are coming up as "Page not found" errors. Heck, I just did a general Google search for "Buslink MLT-8V", and the post you just made is now entry #37 in that list (and is probably more informative than most of the stuff ahead of it).

Chances of finding a ready-built config file are, I suspect, slim to none.

Hmm. If none of the existing Pierogi keysets can power it on, I'm not sure what else there is to do at this point. The only thing left would be to use a device that can "learn" the remote codes off the Buslink remote. (I know that a PC with an IR receiver running the LIRC server can do it, and there are a number of other ways to do so as well.) If you can get those codes, I can probably decode them and add them in to Pierogi...