After experimenting with Crux (which I enjoyed!), I found myself drifting back to FreeBSD for a few reasons (including a few crux crashes under VirtualBox and my comfort with the layout).

I ended up experimenting with tmux instead of dvtm, but getting the a hi-res console working in FreeBSD under VirtualBox was (for some reason) a pain. To get it working, I had to use Kim Lai's FreeBSD framebuffer howto as a reference, and make some modifications.

# cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
# cp GENERIC GENERIC-SC_PIXEL_MODE
# echo "options SC_PIXEL_MODE" >> GENERIC-SC_PIXEL_MODE
# cd /usr/src
# make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC-SC_PIXEL_MODE
# make installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC-SC_PIXEL_MODE
# echo 'vesa_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf
# echo 'allscreens_flags="MODE_325"' >> /etc/rc.conf
# shutdown -r now

With a 1280x1024 console to work with I'll be trying to get UTF-8 working properly under tmux without X.Org. When I figure it out I'll definitely post something to remind me how that feat was accomplished!