Why does JavaFX add extra spacing between letters

Question

I'm trying to use the text component of JavaFX to do some nice headline typography in my application. How ever the letters in the text are not spaced evenly. For example in the word "visiting", the "iting" part seems disconnected from the first part.

In the sample image I'm using Arial but this kind of bad spacing happens with every font I tried.

This only happens when "gray" anti-aliasing is used (-fx-font-smoothing-type: gray;). One obvious solution would be to change -fx-font-smoothing-type to lcd, but that would result in the text having jagged edges.

The only thing remotely mentioning something like this is the jira issue RT-14187, but that seem to have been resolved in javafx 8 (jre 8).