What on earth is going to be a "major visible improvement" to a command line based package manager that any average Gentoo user is going to realise? The average user probably only uses a few commands: emerge -u/p/a/v/--sync/package/world/system and then use package.keywords/mask/unmask so there are really no fundamental differences that the average user will notice
How about the speed of search's? the speed of resolving dependancy's? how about the speed that it takes to calculate a dependancy listing after you've already done it once? portage is SLOW. how about getting it to the point where it could be made to incorporate a graphical frontend if wanted. how about providing me a list of packages that are masked instead of making me read and unmask them one at a time.
