I am happy to say, that is not true.

I think that you need to read:
http://www.boutell.com/gd/manual2.0.1.html
"...version 2.0 does include ... both truecolor and palette images, resampling (smooth resizing of truecolor images) and so forth. "
After you have updating your gd library you should go and visit Lincoln Stein's space on cpan to download GD-2.01.
http://search.cpan.org/author/LDS/

I had been using GD-2.00 since the 6th with decent results and was very pleased to see GD-2.01 made available.
Thanks Lincoln!
An excellent module.

Mmmm... 16,777,216 colors for me.

ImageMagick is huge and slow. I was using shell tools (djpeg, etc) simply to avoid it.