This question was presented to me by someone else, and, as I couldn't find an appropriate answer, I pass it on the the list for futher enlightenment.
What is the Right Way to increase the priority of one option for an alternative? For example, on my system, nvi was installed with a priority of 30, and vim with 20 -- I wanted to make vim 35. The solution I found was to run update-packages --install for vim, as if adding it as an alternative in the first place. Is this correct? An option such that you could do 'update-alternatives --priority vim 35' would be a very good thing, imho.