I'd like to suggest VS adopt HarfBuzz as its text-shaping engine. A few reasons this would be a strong investment:

1. Proper complex script support.
   HarfBuzz handles the shaping rules that simple character-by-character rendering can't: contextual letterforms (Arabic), reordering and conjunct forms (Devanagari and other Indic scripts), and correct ligature/diacritic placement across scripts in general. Without a real shaping engine, these scripts render with visibly broken or disconnected letterforms — a serious limitation for any DTP-capable tool aiming at a global user base. I tried using it in LibreOffice. It is extremely efficient and good. And can maintain consistency for even very difficult ligatures in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, as well as Devanagari and Tibetan.

2. Industry-standard, battle-tested.
   HarfBuzz is the shaping engine behind Chrome, Firefox, LibreOffice, Android, and increasingly Adobe's own products. The latest versions of both Photoshop and Illustrator have integrated HarfBuzz. Adopting it isn't a risky bet.

3. Better OpenType feature support.
   HarfBuzz correctly applies advanced OpenType features for non-Latin script — ligatures, contextual alternates, small caps, stylistic sets, kerning tables — that a custom or simplified text engine often only partially supports. For a tool used in real design/DTP work, that directly affects how professional and typographically accurate the output looks, especially with high-quality display or editorial fonts that lean heavily on these features.

4. Open source and actively maintained.
   It's free to integrate (MIT-licensed), maintained by a broad group of contributors including major browser vendors, and it's a mature, stable dependency rather than something the team would need to build or maintain in-house going forward.

5. Would strengthen VS positioning.
   Since VS already competes in the small-scale design space (multi-page docs, character/paragraph styles, text flow), correct shaping for multilingual and complex-script text is one of the areas where dedicated tools like InDesign still have a clear edge.

It is the single best option available for text shaping. And that fact that it is MIT Licensed means you can include it in your product without any qualifications or worries about legalities.

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz - Here's the Github link to the project. It is constantly updated by contributors worldwide.