Gnome-Terminal and XFT

Gnome-Terminal and XFT

Gnome terminal - probably any terminal using xft, that is even xterm in xft mode - can be really annoying when you have fast-scrolling text.
Call something producing text quite fast - such as compiling a 2.4.x kernel on a remote machine or just catting /usr/share/dict/words - and you will really notice the speed difference.
Doing the cat in gnome-terminal makes the Xserver use 60% of the CPU, gnome-terminal 40%.
Doing the same on a pterm (normal fonts) will be so fast i can't even give you the percentage split used. (but IMHO pterm has other issues, including that it goes nuts sometimes when un-maximizing it)
xterm, even when not using xft, is also taking considerable time for the cat. (64%/36% split)
aterm is almost as fast as putty, using normal fonts, but doesn't support UTF-8.
mlterm is somewhere between aterm and xterm using normal fonts.
konsole appears to be a slight bit faster than gnome-terminal, apparently using some "flood detection" and skipping on fast output.

In total, <b>there is no terminal emulator with which i'm 100% happy</b>.

I'd love antialiased fonts, but the gnome-terminal sometimes causes the xserver to take up a lot of CPU (peaks lasting a couple of seconds; if i had a reliable way to reproduce this i'd report it... must be something like the xserver forgetting the font, then having to regenerate it for AA), i'm really annoyed by that. Konsole without KDE is a desaster. Putty has the window resizing issues and i really hate its configuration menus.
I'd like a stripped down xterm (i do not need any menu) but rxvt appears to be dead upstream.
In fact i dislike all the bells and whistles. What i expect from a terminal emulator is to have UTF-8 support, scrollback and to be fast. I don't need much else: if you want tabs, use a window manager that can do so. ;-)
Also i dislike any kind of menu, scrollbar or configuration dialog that is not integrated into my desktop. For me this means: either do not provide such things, or use GTK. But this is my taste.