@mixedbag: Going to answer in reverse
* No issues w/ kaznelson's stuff, I used to run both in parallel, and those were the days, man!
* The various FW 5.4.x things you describe are very much expected, you're slightly less free to play around, and the default buttons have extra logic to take that into account (hence why the serif stuff via KUAL worked).
EDIT: You left the '%' characters on both ends of the family names in your configs, so, err, that also might explain why things are not working ^^.