What do you mean by "buggy" tools to extract the keys from the wallet.dat? Are they not safe to use?
Is the macbook your only computer? If you have another, you can just install Bitcoin Core and extract the private key, no synchronization needed.
Pywallet is okay and it isn't exactly risky. It might be hard to use if you're unfamiliar with it. As long as you keep several backups of wallet.dat, you would be fine and you can easily switch to another backup if you mess one up.