I use bunch of patches I found on ubuntu forums to patch libXft, cairo and freetype2.
They make fonts prettier than any fonts.conf tweaks (actually my fonts.conf is empty now with gnome 2.24).
But yeah, KDE is loser when it comes to fonts. KDE apps's fonts look ugly no matter what I do.
Anyway, here's my current Gnome 2.24 screenshot:
(1680x1050 / 1.3MB)