Hi Daniel,
I have a very particular setup here for testing and it’s unfortunately a bit outside of the scope of the support I can give here. Sorry! This hasn’t come up before as a developer need, but the use case you’ve described sounds like a perfect match for doing your debugging directly on Pocketsphinx’s executables, since Pocketsphinx is your interest in stepping through rather than OpenEars. VirtualBox and Ubuntu are 100% free and they make a great setup for doing exactly the kind of Pocketsphinx research you have described.