Okay, as promised earlier, went back to forcing busybox ash (but our own, with a slightly cleaned up profile) as the SSH shell.
Tweaked some various stuff in order to deal with the scp softlock mentioned earlier (it's indeed stuck in a poll, as shown by strace. It also showed that sending a signal broke the deadlock, yay).
If all else fails, I've made preparations to allow switching from dropbear to OpenSSH (c.f.,
http://trac.ak-team.com/trac/browser...daemons.sh#L21)
Oh, and finally documented how to compile a set of UTF-8 locales, because broken Unicode outside of busybox was severely pissing me off (c.f., the tail end of the README).