Screenshots and scaling
I've finally discovered why image resizing didn't work when scaling: I believe that when scaling the background layer the projection layer is scaled automatically. Scaling it on its own makes it much too small, hence the blacked-out backgrounds I was having. And I hacked the old KOffice scan plugin and KSnapshot together into a Krita plugin, so I can make snaps of Krita, downscale them -- and presto, Krita is usable for maintaining its own website...
Pity the scaling uses a simple matrix transform, instead of something fancy like bicubic scaling, but soit, honi soit qui mal y pense.