I guess I found the term "bump up the ebuild" ambiguous, didn't realize you meant for me to actually create a new ebuild to get the latest and greatest. Good thing I had enough experience under my belt plus Google-Fu to figure out what it took to do that. I think it will disappear on my next emerge --sync, so I'll have to either do an overlay or talk about it w/ the package maintainer. It seems to have worked for me, I will play with it and see if it is worth submitting a new ebuild.
May I suggest that you update your page on Gentoo installations?
http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download_gentoo The "official" recommended means of installation was using easy_install, which was broken in my case. I had no idea there was a linux binary either (I went straight to the Gentoo page), so thank you for the pointer.
Like I said, i was only offering an opinion. Software library dependencies are nothing new, of course, the product just relies on a lot of new versions of libraries that I suspect most distributions don't have immediately available in stable versions (I would like to believe that Gentoo tends to be pretty good about keeping up with the Joneses, that's one reason I like it). I'm not sure there was a purpose to the "PictureFlow" stuff, which did cause my problems, and, now that I bypassed the issue, ultimately resulted in "that looks kinda cool, but I think I'll keep it turned off."
It is truly an impressive project, and I never had the patience to be a good coder (I do have a computer science degree) so I do admire the skill and time involved, not to mention the great reverse engineering. And, hey, I have no reason to complain about a great product that I use for free. I just thought I'd offer some feedback that it's starting to look like biting off a huge amount of work and complexity for little gains in usability.
Anyway, thanks for the quick responses.