new-portal is hopelessly tied to dotlrn, so don't worry about making it worse. It's a dead-end outside the dotlrn environment.
As far as my rewrite of portal goes, it works fine as a standalone package and has master templates that work with acs-subsite. It knows nothing about .LRN. I gave up the notion of re-integrating it with .LRN primarily due to upgrade problems and due to my general disgust with .LRN internals. I did, at one point, have it working with .LRN but doing so required keeping some of that tight .LRN/portal integration around (ignored from outside the .LRN environment).
So come up with the cleanest solution you can think of regarding the .LRN environment ...
Rewriting .LRN's the preferred solution to pretty much everything but that's a pie-in-the-sky dream at the moment, I'm afraid.
