It seems like FAAC has been dropped due to patent issues:

"No binary distributions are available here, because they require a patent license."

http://www.audiocoding.com/faac.html

That I guess leaves all the dependent rendering profiles broken in Kdenlive. What are some better alternatives to render with?

This is fixed in Kdenlive 0.7.6 and a recent enough FFmpeg from early July when they enabled their native AAC encoder. If you think you got it, but not yet v0.7.6, then you can copy a profile and change libfaac to just 'aac'.

Thanks.

Fixed in SVN.