Well, notwithstanding, the good news is I seem to be able to get Xvesa going...
after setting /etc/sysconfig/Xserver to 'Xvesa' and manually editing .xsession.
Unfortunately this still sucks as we needed Xorg in the first place for our "fr" keyboards.
Anyway to test elsewhere and revert this toxic change (for a Vortex86mx RDC vga).
Prior I tried to force going back to 5.x, but only Xorg 7.7 seems to be in the repository,
so Xorg is busted there now too. Saloperie!