Would it be possible to have the little introduction screen for the
"[S]elect" function show up _before_ dselect sets up the selection
data?  That way the user-waiting-for-apt pause can be overlapped with
the potential dselect-waiting-for-user pause as the user reads the
text.

It would be mostly useful for beginning users, who might otherwise
wonder what dselect was doing while the screen was blank.  Advanced
users could even be given an option to proceed to the selection screen
automatically unless the user pressed some key like "space" while the
introduction screen is shown.