portconfig vs xterm

I was trying to give 13.3-BETA1 a legit tryout and ended up spending 
hours fighting with portconfig. In my experience it does not play well 
with xterm. Function and arrow keys are no-ops and unlike dialog4ports 
it does not allow navigation with ^P/^N. Given that that my TERM is set 
to xterm when I login to the *console* of my newly installed 13.3 system 
(as when I ssh in from my FreeBSD desktop) how can my user experience be 
so terrible?

I eventually figured out I could go back by adding:

     DIALOG=/usr/local/bin/dialog4ports

to /etc/make.conf.

Have a I managed to overlook a subtle clue somewhere?

Similarity, I jave been hitting this on my 13.2 build server and today 
figured out the poudriere itself had a dependency on portconfig. Good 
luck using portconfig to change the option that controls this though. 
(In the end I used my windows laptop which identifies as a vt220 to ssh 
in -- so I didn't have to resort to editing the options file with vi...)

		Craig