Well, a milestone has been reached. I have successfully installed Eclipse 3.01 with the build from source package and a great deal of undocumented, time-consuming additional effort that is required. Comment #14 on Eclipse Bug Report #57897 makes mention of having to build the Eclipse executable and the SWT libraries separately. (NOTE: That is not even mentioned in the documentation bundled with the Eclipse package. You have to REALLY want to install Eclipse on this platform, enough to comb through bug reports.)

I decided to catalog my pilgrimage, and most of it is contained in comment #46 of the bug report. I summarized my experience in the following excerpt from the comment:

Conclusions
1.) The Eclipse JDT can indeed be successfully deployed on the PowerPC Linux GTK
platform.
2.) The current procedure and prerequisite libraries and tools for the
additional required steps are quite laborious; this process would be best
incorporated into the build from source process for Eclipse.

It was a truly satisfying feeling when Eclipse asked for my workspace location and then came up on the screen. I hope this will help to pave the way for the Debian project to package Eclipse 3.