Hi,
There is no real OT support in FreeType2. If you want kerning you'd better have a kern table. :)
I think OT features are easy to implement? I use LCDF-TypeTool (which is a very small program, and does not depend on any font library) and it is easy to convert OpenType fonts with arbitrary features I want to TFM and Type1 fonts. btw, There is a small tool called otfdump (which uses a very small and cpu/memory efficient library, libotf), and it can dump ttf and otf files (just as how fontforge is used in LuaTeX). dumping TeXGyre Heros Regular only takes 0.058 second, and Adobe Song Std Light uses 0.140 second. If we use this library, I think there is no need to implement a font cache system in ConTeXt---since it is very memory efficient and fast. If I am wrong, please point out, I am a font newbie and want to learn more Yue Wang