>I recall reading some postings about how bmake or something else changed
>so that error messages (or other feedback) is hidden.

Depends on what you mean by bmake.
NetBSD -current make, was modified a week or so ago, so that it could
always print the target and the command that failed.  This was apparently
too noisy for pkgsrc folk so a -de command line arg was added to turn 
the new behavior on.  I'm not aware that the default behaviour changed
when -de was added.  Eg:

: sjg:381; cat /homes/sjg/make-tests/error                                    
.BEGIN:
        @echo this is an error; false

all:
$ make -f /homes/sjg/make-tests/error 
this is an error
*** Error code 1

Stop.
make: stopped in /tmp
: sjg:381; make -de -f /homes/sjg/make-tests/error 
this is an error

*** Failed target:  .BEGIN
*** Failed command: echo this is an error; false
*** Error code 1

Stop.
make: stopped in /tmp
: sjg:382; 


bmake-20030912 includes the -de feature.
bmake-20030731 does not, and that's what pkgsrc/devel/bmake still builds.
Last time I looked, bootstrap-pkgsrc builds bmake-3.1.12 which
corresponds to about bmake-20011016

So, the behavior you see could easily be impacted by what bmake you
mean.

--sjg