> Personally I have never understood the whole font hinting thing. It seems rather unscientific and the result is that fonts look fundamentally different at slight size differences; seems hinting is part of the problem, not the solution.

Hinting exists because displays don't have infinite resolution. Mac-style rendering has always acted like displays have paper-like resolutions, and respects a font's letter shapes more, favoring the original designer's intended font appearance on paper. Windows-style rendering has always acknowledged that displays have pixels, and that smearing fonts across pixels can decrease readability on average-DPI displays. Linux font rendering has historically offered a choice between the two, but typically defaulted to Windows-style rendering.