I also cringed a little when I read that they used the same package name for their replacement, especially considering they were aware of virtuals and the alter

I also cringed a little when I read that they used the same package name for their replacement, especially considering they were aware of virtuals and the alternatives frameworks... although I've never tried to do what they did, so maybe they had issues converting the entire portage tree to be compliant. I'll admit that it's a lot of work, but if you wanted to do it right, you'd have to put in that additional work.