Not so much a question as as bug report I guess.
Arnold ROPs don't do a good job of respective relative paths to operators
For example, in the AOV shader parameter
../../shop/AOV/
does NOT work
/obj/shop/AOV/
does
This is not ideal, as it kills the flexibility of wrapping up setups to pass to other artists and scenes. There's been a few instances of this in other areas, such as when writing ASS archives of geo contained in objnets. I'll update this post when I find more.