somehow the issues surrounding gettext and rebuilding all its dependents were unrecoverable for me. CPU time is cheaper that mine, so I wiped out /opt and am starting over.
I figured a good way to start is to build a port that requires a lot of infrastructure to be built, and get it all over with. I picked inkscape. it chugged long nicely until here:
checking icon-naming-utils >= 0.8.1... no
configure: error: icon-naming-utils >= 0.8.1 is required to build
and install gnome-icon-theme
installed icon-naming-utils and then started again (the interactive mode is pretty useful: hats off to whosever idea that was). looks like gnome-icon-theme needs fixing.
inkscape did eventually finish, so I guess everything is OK now.