UPDATE: This functionality was released on 1/9/12 in v1.7.0.
Currently RequestReduce is unable to sprite alot of background images because of its limitation of treating each css class as an atomic unit. Inheritable dimensions and padding is lost which either makes an image unspritable by RequestReduce or the sprite is malformed because of improperly calculated dimensions.
Further, pre-sprited images in a document about to be reduced are often malformed and rendered in a distorted fashion because it is common practice to place the background url in one widely inherited class and have more specific classes define just the background-position of the individual image in the sprite. This makes many initial renderings using RequestReduce give a bad first impression especially if the user does not read the wikis on preparing the sprites and spriting requirements here and here. It can also make the exercise of converting docs to be compatible with RR spriting a time consuming and tedious endeavor.
I had initially thought this was a small edge case but it is proving to be an all too common problem and I think the adoption story could be dramatically improved by adding this feature. This is the one feature that can break the RequestReduce golden rule: do not break the page I am reducing. The addition of this feature can prevent this.
Unfortunately it is not a small effort. However it is not monumental either.