Because it was driving me crazy while working on the new medm screens for the simulated plant, I went and removed the aliased font entries in /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.alias that are associated with medm.  Specifically I removed the lines  starting with widgetDM_.  I made a backup in the same directory called fonts.alias.bak with the old lines.

Medm now behaves the same on op440m, rosalba, and allegra - i.e. it can't find the widgetDM_ scalable fonts and defaults to a legible fixed font.