http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31374
--- Comment #62 from Jerome Leclanche adys.wh@gmail.com 2013-07-11 04:19:55 CDT --- (In reply to comment #60) Issue trackers are for the developers' convenience. In this project, developers find it convenient to identify regressions when they are actually caused by issues in the code, rather than new features suddenly being used by the application. It's 100% irrelevant how Linus or anyone else might react in a different project.
As for disabling it by default, that's not going to happen. This bug only affects steam, and not only does steam have a flag to disable dwrite, dwrite.dll can also be disabled from winecfg. If you install steam from winetricks, this is taken care of automatically. This is as convenient as it gets. More noise in this bug isn't going to make the devs change their mind.
The best things you can do to help it: - Buy crossover. The money goes to Wine devs; you might also be able to set up a bounty on this bug from there. Also I think dwrite might be disabled on Steam in crossover. - Actually work on this bug and submit hard code (I'm sure even tests would help).
For some reason though, I doubt you'll do either of those things because *disabling dwrite is extremely easy already* (and a hell of a lot easier than writing code or shelling out money). There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but afterwards you can't come in here all entitled and expect devs to follow your will rather than how things arrange *them*.
Regardless, this will not make the 1.6 cut. Wine is in the release candidate stages and that's simply too late for major features like these.