Symlinked Dotfiles Are Not Working
Your ln syntax is wrong, which is leading to self-referential symbolic links. For example:

% mkdir .dotfiles
% cd .dotfiles/
% touch .foo
% ln -s .foo ..
% cd ..
% ls -l .foo
lrwxr-xr-x  1 tph  wheel  4 Dec  5 10:38 .foo@ -&gt; .foo


At this point .foo exists but it's a symlink to itself, not to the copy in .dotfiles.

Probably the easiest way to do it is to cd ~ and make the symlinks from there:

% cd ~
% ln -s .dotfiles/.foo .
% ls -l .foo 
lrwxr-xr-x  1 tph  wheel  14 Dec  5 10:46 .foo@ -&gt; .dotfiles/.foo