I think Netbeans is not getting the font settings from GNOME. From what I can see from the panel, GNOME uses slight font hinting here. But the Netbeans window uses full hinting.
The fix would be to roll our own matching ~/.fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf for all the non-GNOME applications.
As of the last time I tried Netbeans (I have long since moved exclusively to Vim), this was not successful either. I have my font preferences replicated in ~/.fonts.conf and I could not get Netbeans to use those settings either.