the new blocker I thought was to prevent version 0.6, not block 0.6 & 0.5 which is now preventing all updates
Bug #442024 tells why 0.5 is a problem now, 0.4 should be fine. It's unfortunate that yet another downgrade is needed, but I don't believe it's a bug.
That's exactly what it does, it adds !=app-misc/pax-utils-0.5. http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/sys-kernel/genkernel/genkernel-3.4.45.ebuild?r1=1.11&r2=1.12 Please note that there already was a <app-misc/pax-utils-0.6 in place regardless of this fix, for this dependency there is already another bug which tracks this temporary fix so I'll be marking this one as a duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 450688 ***
*** Bug 464626 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***