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.
