I can't say how much the use of "pause" helps, considering i deleted somefiles from my persistent local which apparently were causing trouble, but that option at least allowed me to see the messages from init, which is always a good thing. I think I'll need to recreate my local directory, since it was originally created from tcz files...I have a feeling it would be better to use tce and add anything outside /usr/local to a remaster.
As it stands now I no longer have the problem with getting kicked back to a login prompt, and I'm still not sure why that happened. With the future use of getty instead of rungetty I'm guessing I won't see it again, though it doesn't explain what caused the trouble. It seems as though it might be related to using OSS.tzcm as part of a persistent tclocal.