I've remove the original text, as this is just some general comments.
I muddled through the update with more-or-less three total rebuilds of everything python, and some hold-overs on two VMs. Third one I though this has got to be doable as per the final snippet of shell code in the news item:
---- Upgrade commands ===== [...]emerge --depclean emerge -1vUD @world emerge --depclean ------
