Hi there, it would be an nice feature to exclude/include masked packages from emerge or qpkg searches. 'emerge -s --exclude-masked xmms' should only show available xmms packages whose are not masked, for example.
Putting a hold on feature requests for portage as they are drowning out the bugs. Most of these features should be available in the next major version of portage. But for the time being, they are just drowning out the major bugs and delaying the next version's progress. Any bugs that contain patches and any bugs for etc-update or dispatch-conf can be reopened. Sorry, I'm just not good enough with bugzilla. ;)
Consider this closed as WONTFIX. This is IMO not feasable for emerge, qpkg is long gone and most other tools can handle masked packages.