I was trying to reach you on IRC, but iirc last time I have success was by the time we were discussing co-maintainership for CSSU repos(somewhen July-August 2011). Anyway, I really don't want to go into dispute who is right/wrong, I am glad to see myself out of the ignore list. Lets focus on the real problems.

One of them being kernel-power package name. There is rationale why Pali refuse to change it, there are just too many other packages depening on kernel-power, I don't think there is a way all of them to be actively maintaned so their dependencies to be changed accordingly. So a change in kernel-power will make all those packages incompatible with "kernel-power-new" or wathever fancy name we put on it. I am sure you can imagine the mess.

Could you please share the link to the code of the function which is responsible for package version comparison, after all we are developers dealing with much harder to find bugs than a glitch in some string parsing python/php/whatever function.

EDIT:

An ugly and nasty, but working hack, will be to add a code that checks for that particular package name and deal with it accordingly.