Thanks for your reply. Considering that the first target of MyFaces was to implement the JSF specification, I guess there are a lot of areas that can be improved. At some point I'd like to commit my FacesUtil class to the project, which contains several extremely handy shortcuts for the rather noisy JSF API.
Currently I'm happy I got MyFaces with Facelets working on both Websphere Portal 5.1 and 6, with IBM's portlet wiring. Regards Jörn