Text turned and filled leaves white spots.

[photodrawken]

But...yeah, with PSP you'd have to manually edit each path in order to fix the overlap.

Yes. Photoshop at least has a "Back minus Front" option which I think would allow the lower character shape to be automatically modified. One would have to first duplicate each "front" shape because the "Back minus Front" function deletes the "front" shape. Tedious, at best....

In PSP, one could also achieve the effect by
1. Creating the text.
2. Converting the text to a single shape.
3. Modifying the shapes as wanted.
4. Creating a selection from that vector object.
5. Creating a new raster layer beneath the vector "text" shape layer.
6. Filling the selection on that raster layer with the gradient.
7. Setting the fill of that top vector shape layer to transparent.
8. Adding a mask to that top vector shape layer and painting on the mask to hide the overlapping portions of the strokes.

I haven't tested that, since I'm more interested in retaining the "text" (including the fill) as vector shapes.

[photodrawken]

EDIT: Erased original response. Once again I replied without understanding exactly what you were talking about.

It's my fault, entirely. Re-reading my post, I see that my writing was very imprecise. Apologies.