The problem is that now it crashes as soon as you open the drop-down in the text toolbar, because of auto previews. Previously it only crashed if you clicked specifically on that font in Font dialog list. So now Inkscape _seems_ much more crashy. And judging by the number of the reports, this is going to be a really major problem.
Pango appears to have been tweaked in 1.11.3 and above to make this a non-fatal error (http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/pango/pango/shape.c?r1=1.12&r2=1.13). The comments seem to indicate that the font will look ugly, but that's much better than taking all of Inkscape down.
I agree with Bulia about the severity of this problem, and would strongly argue that Pango is upgraded (probably to 1.12.3) for pre1 so we can get some testing to make sure the newer version is good.
Richard.