I don't like some of the moves being made by emacs lately, deprecating libxft for example. It's been fixed but the FreeDesktop people won't take the patches because they're "so over" X11 now.
Could you link to what you’re referencing? I’m not familiar with X development but it looks like libXft had a 2.3.4 release around 10 months ago, which seems relatively active for X-related projects.