I believe --emptytree was originally implemented as a developer tool to be able see the complete set of dependencies of a package. It may well have that the original implementation didn't know what was installed and thus had to mark packages as "N". It may have been that showing the "R", "U", etc was too distracting. It may have even been a performance trade-off. Whatever the case was, there is no performance improvement now and the USE flags shown when using --verbose do show changes against what is currently installed. I would guess that --emptytree is also more oft used for system tasks rather than developer tasks as well. My request is to unify the --emptytree output with all the rest.
Created attachment 100071 [details, diff] Remove --empty-tree special casing
Thanks, your patch is in svn r4761.
This has been released in 2.1.2_pre3-r6.
