OpenSUSE Install :: Restoring Kernel Spew On Boot

I've recently performed a clean upgrade from 11.0 to 11.3 (wipe / partition to ext4, retain /home disk, swap partition etc.) and everything is fine, installed as Gnome distro with KDE3 from repos.Anyway, I've noticed that SuSE will say "doing fast boot" and suspend any console spew until after the kernel has finished with hardware detection and the like. I'd like to be able to see exactly what's happening with the kernel at boot, as I'm quite paranoid and in the event of system failure etc. it would be difficult to view the logs post-boot. Also, my IDE optical drives have a habit of sometimes only being partially detected due to the power line being somewhat intermittent, and I've seen the kernel attempt to re-stablish a link on 11.0, whereas I'd never be able to see that in 11.3 unless I see the console spew, so it would look like the system hanging on "doing fast boot".

Note: I do not want to disable splash=silent, unless spalsh has another option which will give me the desired functionality. I want to have a silent boot, with the option of going verbose with Esc; it's one of the things that I love about SuSE.Oh, and Grub was a nightmare as usual with disk ordering differing at run-time from config file and the total freeze at "loading stage2", so I had to manually fix that. Why does the installer seemingly ignore or revert the specific options I set for GRUB? I understand that the default options for GRUB are ok for single disk users, but my disk ordering is not overly exotic. I stress that this was not user error, as I've had the same issue from going from 10.2 to 10.3 to 11.0, even though they were clean grub installs (rewrites). /rant.