other, more basic issues far more important for emacs

Looking at the big picture, emacs releases are glacial. The tight control of the lead
maintainer is legendary and has been responsible for many talented hackers giving up on emacs
and taking their hacking talents elsewhere.

It is criminal that support for decent type in emacs on free software systems has not present
in official, released versions for the past two or three years. Whereas other, non-free
systems don't put up with crap like this and have had decent type for years. 

Instead, most die-hard emacs users on GNU systems are forced to use:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/XftGnuEmacs

Status still uncertain.