In TBGL -> It should not - before I generated texture handles for fonts first, which made handle offset from the begining. That is why it was handled that way. Now first go the textures and then fonts... so in TBGL, it will match.
But! "Thanks" to this, that TBGL init goes first, in sprites module your texture handles will start at bigger number, not from 1. And as I think of it, it will not be good idea to use fixed size texture list at all. Better to generate new texture handle for each sprite using glGenTextures command.
I can write you "garbage collector" for this if you need. In the end it will be more transparent and I will do such a thing in TBGL as well for the already mentioned "dynamic" approach.
Petr