Blendy state works, but interacts funny with the backbuffer over certain background window colors on Windows 8. It's a tad strange, but I can live with it for now (most implementations will have an opaque window anyways).
Both QuadBatch and NymphBatch can render raster fonts and textures. Still need to work on polygonal goodies for NymphBatch, but the rendering code is still laying dormant there.
Now, we can begin more work on all the things!