I found two examples of said retardedness today.

• Even with my freetype fir filter hack, fonts in open office writer look super fringy. WTF. Are they using a totally different rendering path?
• If you set the hinting level in the gnome appearance control applet to “slight”, but your xrdb says “Xft.hintstyle: hintfull”, then Firefox renders text with what appears to be full hinting, but kerned as if it were slight hinting, leading to disastrous results.

WTF, peoples.

BTW, Windows Live Writer 2009 rocks.