I figured I might as well point out that phantom (being awesome) has helped me with setting up an FBO option for those of you with nice video cards that like rendering to texture. In a word, FBO is fast. If you're using OpenGL, you must pick up and use FBO. There is no question -- the speed is so fantastic that it justifies any compatibility headache you may encounter with older (pre-Geforce4) videocards.
Still no hope on the crashy-shaders front; as far as I can tell it's dying in the OpenGL dynamic library somewhere just before making the jump to syscall land. SHilbert seems to believe it's a buggy OpenGL driver, and considering ATI's track record, that no longer seems all that rare to me.
So I'll keep going on, and hopefully this problem gets rectified in the OS X patch that's still waiting to be installed.
Still have lots of midterm-y stuff to settle up, but as soon as that's properly taken care of I should also have some really killer screenshots (and movies) of my user interface and early attempts at a camera system. Maybe even some light flying-about and shooting.
At the moment I'm doing RTT stuff directly to the framebuffer, and good old glCopyTexSubImage. It's probably quite a bit slower, but it does mean I don't have to worry about compatability at all.