Well I've been playing around this evening and I can confirm some suspicions.

First the cdimage that is under the June snapshot (not the one with the 
-1.5 suffix) is definitely non-functional. It will boot and install but the 
kernel it leaves behind doesn't work. With the boot program that is in the 
sets it doesn't even start, using the boot program from the CD image causes 
it to load the image, but trying to start it results in a failure. (this is 
on KA6xx series CPUs)

Some bits of information for people who are playing with these things, if 
you boot the ramdisk kernel successfully you can mount the CD image using

mount -t cd9660 /dev/<cd-device> /mnt2

Now on my CQD-443 the CD showed up as ra1, on the VLC it shows up as cd0.

The new boot program looks for 'netbsd.vax' before it looks for 'netbsd' so 
if you have a copy of netbsd.vax in the root directory and it isn't a 
working kernel you are in for some trouble!

By booting the netbsd.ram image and then mounting a CD with the 1.5-Alpha 
sets, I copied the boot and kernel from those sets and tried booting them. 
They worked fine and after I had made the devices I can now boot this 3400 
(KA640) from the CMD CQD-443 controller. (this didn't work for a while but 
it does now)

Of course with the 1.5A kernel and the snapshot userland many things dump 
core. Thus my next step will be to get a 1.5A userland on to the disk. I 
would prefer to have a "non-kerberized" version so I'm going to try to 
build the snapshot without kerberos stuff. (the 1.5A snapshot seems to have 
been compiled with strong security enabled or something)

--Chuck