When tensor shading poles are not spatially monotonic, it is decomposed into too thin stripes. A better way is an early subdivision of stripes into quandrangles in the parameter space. Don't forget about the filling order of a self-covering tensor. The effect may be observed with 09-47L. This problem has been moved from bug 688836.
Changing the decomposition order won't work for self-intersecting tensor shadings. Only way is the Z buffer, which must store the parameter v.
Assigning to Robin, since he is working in this area. If this is not really valid then please feel free to close.
Bug still reproducible in Ghostscript 9.03