I'm not involved with development, but the issue has been acknowledged in developer meeting notes:
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-May/040144.html

However, with the 2.68 release candidate out, I don't think anything has happened in that regard.

As for the renderer working with custom normals, I wouldn't call it "support", rather a "happy accident". Indeed, the internal renderer did perform recalculations up until a while ago (I only figured out that it doesn't do that anymore yesterday). This was probably changed with the integration of the new BMesh modeling system. Currently, the normals are just a writable property and all renderers/exporters use it, as far as I can tell.