Is there support for advanced visual effects (transparency, etc.) without using compositing?
In an effort to keep the codebase clean of workarounds (if not even hacks), the Plasma developers have decided that features that require compositing to work will not have a composite-less version. The main reasoning is that in the past (KDE 3.5.x), such approaches were one of the causes of the unmaintainability of the code, and also because supporting those features is actually pushing graphics card developers to write better graphics drivers.
