I got output like the screenshots. In http://swtch.com/plan9port/screenshots/macosx1.png, the lack of smoothing is most noticeable in the forward slashes. I tried all the things you suggest except that I mailed 9fans, not plan9port-dev. Bad setup strikes me as extremely unlikely because I tried twice (p9p on Linux, then 9vx on OS X) and because the responses I got on 9fans were two hacks which add text smoothing to Plan 9. (The two hacks were unsatisfactory, as the characters had inconsistent spacing and artifacts surrounded the glyphs sometimes.)

Again, if all the text I look at during a session at the computer were rendered by Plan 9, I could probably get used to it (since I ran Linux in text mode for years, and the text mode on my video card had no smoothing unless I am very, very much mistaken), but that would be impractical because Plan 9 does not have a satisfactory graphical web browser. You're not going to contest that last statement, are you? Heck, even Russ Cox does not use Plan 9 for browsing the web.