I think it's a perfectly fine idea to do what was suggested earlier. Use fbcon for bootmenu if preinit/bootmenu detects fbcon is loaded (which would happen if it was available AND the person configured it to load), and fall back on text2screen for when it's not.

That way you avoid the screen tearing problems mentioned above, but can have your framebuffer device text rendering as well.

Alternatively you have to configure all these boot script to check if fbcon is loaded, and then safely unload it, before proceeding to something that's using text2screen.

Sidenote: I also still think a basic recovery shell option should be built into preinit itself - actually, ideally, a recovery shell should be hacked into NOLO, but that's not happening until that's properly reverse-engineered and/or an open source version exists (does one? I think I've seen someone mentioning something like that on TMO within the last month?) - I know it's a minute difference, but the further away from the very first script ran you get, the more likely that someone will delete or modify or break it, and yet has the device booting correctly at least to /sbin/preinit execution.

Putting a simple shell as early as possible within /sbin/preinit is slightly more likely to let someone save a device from a screw up when editing some other boot-related script/program.