Ok, so short update:
The text settings docker is still not merged because all manpower went into the 5.2.3 release, and the person who’d review my patch went on holiday. That said, I did manage to discuss fonts with him, and I’ll be working in the meantime on the font picker as well as improving the underlying font selection mechanism.
So hopefully in a week or two I’ll be able to show the font picker and explain the different font selection features, as well as a supplementary technical deep dive blog post rambling about the 5-10 ways a font file can describe its relationship to the other fonts in the same family.
I hope to do this with other properties as well as I polish them, and then hopefully you guys will have a better idea of what the text layout is exactly capable of.