I think you're right in that the Backport fields and backport-create-issue problem are related. I think the Captcha I added to the New Issue page was to blame. I rolled the reCaptcha plugin back a few commits and the Backport creation page is rendering correctly now. Can you test your script again please?
Tested - working again. Thanks!
If the plugin /is/ to blame, I'd love it if someone with some rails experience could lend a hand in getting the Captcha to show up at the appropriate time and not mess with the page rendering!
No Rails experience here :-( Nathan