Hooray!
"a potential end to staring at a screen during start-up while a seemingly endless parade of fonts load."
This is great news -- this is literally the only thing about GIMP that I find truly annoying. I fixed it in my workflow -- when I know I'll be doing image editing, I just fire GIMP up well in advance and don't close it until I'm sure that I'm done for the day. But it would be nicer if I didn't have to put up with the slow loading.