There appears to be broad agreement that this behavior change is an improvement for large fonts and variable width fonts, but there is fervent argument that it's a regression for small monospace fonts. Discussion on #ubuntu-devel yielded a compromise proposal to use fontconfig to select the previous LCD filter behavior for fonts with small pixelsizes. All parties seem to be happy with this proposal, so I will also be happy to accept such an implementation for the beta.
There appears to be broad agreement that this behavior change is an improvement for large fonts and variable width fonts, but there is fervent argument that it's a regression for small monospace fonts. Discussion on #ubuntu-devel yielded a compromise proposal to use fontconfig to select the previous LCD filter behavior for fonts with small pixelsizes. All parties seem to be happy with this proposal, so I will also be happy to accept such an implementation for the beta.