I've modified Inkscape to render at a slightly higher quality by avoiding repeated normalizations in libnr/nr-compose.cpp. I've uploaded examples of the results to:
http://home.hccnet.nl/th.v.d.gronde/about-test-old.png http://home.hccnet.nl/th.v.d.gronde/about-test-new.png http://home.hccnet.nl/th.v.d.gronde/gradient-test-old.png http://home.hccnet.nl/th.v.d.gronde/gradient-test-new.png
The first two are the current "about" drawing, exported to bitmap using Inkscape 0.44 (old) and reasonably current SVN+changes to compositing (new). The second two just show the gradient in background of the "about" drawing, which shows the "problem" with current version of Inkscape more clearly (if you have a hard time spotting the difference, look for a dark band in the upper left corner in the old image, it shouldn't be there, and it isn't in the new image).
Is this considered as interesting (if so, I'll try to clean up the patch and submit it to the patch tracker for review?), or will this become obsolete very quickly?