Yes, but the whole point of subpixel rendering is aesthetics. Its job is to make fonts look smoother and crisper, and in majority of cases it does just that. I'

Yes, but the whole point of subpixel rendering is aesthetics. Its job is to make fonts look smoother and crisper, and in majority of cases it does just that. I'll accept that OS X's rendering of bold fonts on dark backgrounds is terrible, which is where the text-shadow trick comes in handy (or antialiasing, which I think is the same thing in that case), but I'm not sure that for body fonts this is the right way to go. I see this technique popping up here and there and in many cases the fonts end up looking worse. Sure, it's up to the designer to decide what's best--it always is--which is why it's good to have this discussion so that people can better understand which choices to make.