My lurker's interpretation is that there are two model of emacs usage at
odds here:
1) emacs is my environement (My emacs controls the horizontal and the
vertical. OS themes be damned! Just stay out of its way.)
2) emacs as a good citizen in a OS themed setting

The latter is likely the expectation of (most?) modern newbies.  They use
many windowed applications that display text and perform simple
manipulations using a foreground color, background color and selection
highlight color specified by an OS theme.  They may well have exploited
their ability to adjust the OS theme.  But being newbies they have yet to
embark on customizing emacs' colors.  Hence they expect fontlocked text to
cohabit comfortably with their OS theme's background and selection colors.

/john


On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>wrote:

> > The most concrete objection is the case of inheriting faces Yidong
> brought
> > up in another mail, which indeed is a real problem.
>
> Can someone clarify the problem?
> Is there an alternative suggestion which solves the original problem
> while at the same time fixing this one?
>
>
>         Stefan
>
>