I was having problems with rxvt-unicode in #NetBSD (I think they don't have its terminfo definitions by default) and xterm was pretty ugly to work with.
So I instead went with another old terminal I haven't used in quite literally a decade: Sakura. It's the terminal emulator used by the #SliTaz project, another ultra-minimalist lightweight Linux distro project. To my surprise: everything works very well, it's still pretty lightweight and also very modern!
I guess some bad things come for good reasons!