From the user point of view it is a bad bug that you cannot bootstrap a 64-bit compiler starting from a 32-bit one (because stage2 does not find a 64-bit libiberty to use).
To me, "bootstrap" means that all three compilers are identical in configuration, so I don't follow your example. Except "cd gcc; make bootstrap" because the two methods *cannot* live together in the same tree. Since that's what I (and others, from the sound of it), need to do all the time, it sounds like we'll keep using --disable-bootstrap forever.