i always disliked hinting aswell, but thankfully one can just disable hinting on linux, and then fonts actually look fairly similar to what osx did(~10-15 years ago)
Full hinting is a must-have if you turn AA off and use fonts that were designed to be hinted to a pixel grid.
Fonts have several distinct periods where they were designed expecting that renderers would function a certain way. File format notwithstanding, one size does not fit all. You really do need to match your font to your renderer's settings.
You can also match your renderer's settings to your font, and have it different for different fonts, via fontconfig. But actually using that is pretty advanced.
that may well be, but for me, I choose no hinting, with AA activated, and if a font does not look good, I simply do not use it.
IF i specifically REALLY wanted a font that required hinting to look good, I would make a special config for that particular font, but I would need some serious advantage to bother doing that
Why not use slight hinting then? FreeType explains it as only using the vertical hint but not the horizontal one and they recommend this as working well with cleartype fonts and pretty well with non-cleartype fonts.
