I can honestly say I've never noticed the VESA LFB issue, but it doesn't surprise me (or bother me). I'm one of those weird people who likes to mess with computer parts far more than actually using them.
In this case, I'm trying to max out a Gateway 2000 low profile computer that reminds me of my first new PC which was a Gateway 2000 386SX. This system currently has a POD83, 32MB of RAM, a 10BaseT network card that can host boot EEPROMs, a wavetable sound card with on-board EIDE controller, and a 12x ATAPI CD-ROM drive.
I'd like to use some large SD cards as boot drives, so I'm looking for good solutions. While I can use, and have used, overlay software, it isn't easy or convenient to modify these drives on other computers once the overlay software partitions/formats the drive. I had hoped that XT-IDE would solve the drive geometry problem across the board. It seems to work for well for DOS and Windows 95, but NT's failure is a bit of a bummer. I'm going to test OS/2 next.