I have definitely found myself annoyed by the portal pop-up location as well. I don't think it would be too hard to fix either. Something like changing the code to cause the portal to spawn a certain distance from your character (yards, pixels or whatever measurement the game uses), in a certain direction (maybe due north or 12 o'clock), doing a check for obstacles or being off the map, then repeating until it finds a "safe" place to spawn.