Regretfully, that was not the full solution.
On the other hand, I can not be sure if that was caused by something I did. Clearly you are required to move on to the next sub-version of Gnome3 (which is annoyingly different from before *again*), but as it turns out you also need to reinstall 'gdk-pixbuf'.
So okay, I'm back up and running. The events of the last few weeks have made me suspicious however about the stability of this distribution. I've been using Sabayon Linux for years now and have actually promoted it to other people, so what's going on guys? You're not only making me look bad, but making me feel bad as well...

