The mloop issue was caused by me forgetting I was using my version of mloop from Porteus as the Porteux version doesn't handle zstd. It looks for httpfs2 as well as archivemount.
The noload cheatcode continues to be present, noload=xfce stops the boot, noload=003-xfce works fine. I'll try building a VM though that may be a while.
Update:
I've fixed the noload=xfce problem for my machine by editing linuxrc, lines 208 and 227........changed egrep -ve to egrep -vw. For whatever reason, linuxrc doesn't like to parse "xfce". Also, I posted previously that Porteus 5.0 booted with that cheatcode, I was wrong on that, it hangs also. I'm off to rebuild an initrd for it too.