Besides- wouldn't you rather I unsnafu the esp chip variants, which I'm
   supposed to know about, first?

Actually, no, the NCR is one of the few things with SRM boot support and a
NetBSD driver, near as we can tell, and we've looked a lot....  Folks like
ITI claim to have the fastest thing you can use with a PCI bus, and well,
there are the EB164 and PC164 cards around, and it would be great to have
them reliable.  I expect those to be the hobbyist systems of the near
future given the earlier news about 22164s and this story about Intel
having Alpha rights....  If you get an ARC boot for the PC164LX, that
will be even better (and $2000 cheaper).  Then we could use Adaptec cards,
too, I know they have ARC boot support for them :).