| Is there any way to make this more robust?  Or to make sure that users
| have some clue about how to change this to get it to work?  I consider
| myself pretty clueful on the whole and I had to dig for a while to
| figure this out (and I didn't get any messages with suggestions, so it
| must not be a trivial and well-known problem)...

I wish there was. I don't have any good suggestions.
If it's any consoluation, I was behind on my NetBSD mail and would
have gotten to your message later today...

Note that there is a lot of text in INSTALL right now on the netbsd-1-4
branch about dealing with this problem, and I think if you were
installing 1.4.2A right now and following along in the instructions
[do people do that?], then it would have looked better. But I dno't
think distrib/notes has the same text in -current, perhaps we can
do better for 1.5. I don't know.

Either way, I guess this should make a PR if nothing better
can be done.

Could someone comment on the feasability of per-CIS quirks for this?

--jhawk