Comment 24 for bug 63403

This strange behaviour is issue (1), which I believe this bug report was about.
I believe you only had issue (3).
However, (1) and (3) could be different consequence of the same problem, since it seems like the same apps are affected (contents of gnome terminal).
That is:
gnome terminal looks blurry when medium hinting is used (1)
gnome terminal seems to look at ~/.fonts.conf in priority over Xft resources (3)

It seems to me there are much more apps that behave correctly than not. The apps that don't behave correctly are widely used though (gnome terminal, firefox and openoffice). I'm not sure this is a fontconfig problem, and not a problem in these apps.
It just was more obvious to establish openoffice was in fault, because it's much more broken than firefox or gnome terminal, so there is already a specific bug report for it.