turns out my problem was profoundly simple, I hadn't updated my portage mirror list in either of the past two geological ages... (it should have reported "WAITING ON FETCH" in the emerge update, that would have saved me about 2 days figuring that out...)
Mirrorselect actually worked. =O Perl cleaner or whatever it's called solved the rest... Actually just turning on yet more verbosity allowed me to manually clean everything out in a reasonable amount of time... My make.conf is starting to look like a litany of verbosity enables. -- The vaccine is a LIE. #EggCrisis White is the new Kulak. Powers are not rights.
