Err, here's the problem here. Clouds do not cast faint shadows onto the terrain currently. Now this is easiest to see if you turn down the brightness and switch off smooth lighting. When you get close to a current shadow on the terrain, and only when you get close, the shadows start to spread across your world like a virus 1 block at a time. You can be flying directly under a cloud, it won't make a single shadow on your world.
Well, I don't always have clouds around in rl, so it would be different for me having shadows all over the place, then again I also don't have farm animals all over the place either. The thing with the darkness bugs is that it used to be fixed but it lagged us more, so now we don't lag as much but have more lighting issues. I prefer less lag so..
OP, the shadow problem people are complaining about does not refer to anything related to clouds. They refer to the lighting glitches that create dark spots under overhangs and in caves.
I'm using the 1.3 Pre-release right now, and there are a lot of those glitches around. They're annoying, but it's fun to go around in Creative and place torches to get rid of them.
I saw a lot of people posting about this problem when they see shadows on the ground and I decided I should post this.
How to not die in a cave
Provided that it didn't allow monsters to survive daytime.
My hobby? Necro-ing old threads that are actually still relevant.
I'm pretty sure the lighting glitches are a bug. At least the ones that make dark patches and stuff are.
Well, sometimes it helps to injects some variety. In case you didn't notice, about 80% of the threads on the first page are about the same thing. :/
On-Topic: But the thread is discussing shadows being cast by clouds. I think that would be fairly cool.
I'm using the 1.3 Pre-release right now, and there are a lot of those glitches around. They're annoying, but it's fun to go around in Creative and place torches to get rid of them.