Is forced transparency of the notes normal?

On Xubuntu 12.04, xfce4-notes-plugin 1.7.7, the notes themselves are very transparent, making them very hard to read -- even under the best of circumstances. There seems to be no way to adjust this. Changing gtk themes doesn't change the notes theme. Additionally, changing the color of the back of the notes themselves doesn't change the transparency either. Changing focus doesn't change the transparency. Compositing is not enabled on my machine.

Changing the background color of the notes can increase the visibility of the text, but doesn't change the transparency.

On the screenshots provided on the developer's page: http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-notes-plugin the notes are shown as both transparent and opaque -- or at least they appeared to be opaque in some of the shots.

I'm wondering -- is this transparency difficulty a bug on my end or a missing feature to adjust transparency?

If it is a missing feature, it would seem better to include an option to adjust transparency -- as well as the color of the text on the notes. Keeping transparency fixed limits what background colors can be chosen because the text color is also fixed. Additionally, for those who need a white text on black background configuration (for those who code a lot or do a lot of night work), the light text/dark background is not an option for the notes as-is and can be a bit bright.