This misfeature has been grating on me for a while. I usually have one big xterm and open up small ones on top of it, and this functionality makes it impossible to switch focus to the big one without obscuring the others.
Today it finally annoyed me enough to go fix it. The attached patch makes CirculateRaise apply to the window you finally end up giving focus to, like windowmaker always used to do. The "right" way (according to the quoted mailing list interpretation of CirculateRaise) would probably be to make a new option which controls this behavior. I may submit a patch to upstream doing just that, but IMO CirculateRaise ought to apply as it always used to; the way the attached patch returns it to.
rjl-focus-patch
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