Darren Hart noted that bb.debug messages are not logged to a file anywhere, nor are they displayed on the console when bitbake is invoked with -DDD during recipe parsing. bb.note messages, on the other hand, are displayed on the console. This is not a bug intended for fixing during the 1.1 release cycle, but I'm recording it here to help keep track of it.
I think this one is now fixed.
Confirmed, this now works fine on master.