I personally find Computer Modern quite pleasant to read and work with.

Apart from personal preference, why avoid Computer Modern?

It shows that you took an extra year to write your dissertation. ;-)

Just kidding, but I got my degree 25 years ago, and at the time, the students who tried to have a perfectly typeset document spent a lot of time on that pursuit.

It is an extremely thin font which makes it unsuitable for screen reading.

A lot of the time, the TeX output target is paper, and there (with a decent resolution printer) it looks rather splendid (in my view anyway).

For me the horizontal line in the letter "e" often disappears with smaller text sizes.

But then how will people know how smart I am for using LaTeX? ;)

Any typeface in particular that you do recommend?

I used Bitstream-Charter [1] for my dissertation. It looks much better than Computer Modern.

My resume is typeset in Linux Libertine [2] which is used in this superlatively beautiful and elegant CV template by Dario Taraborelli [3]. Requires xelatex.

[1] http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/charterbt/

[2] http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/linuxlibertine/

[3] http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex

Somewhat controversial, but I like it: Minion Pro :)

\usepackage{mathpazo}

Or

\usepackage[utopia]{mathdesign}

Some people like garamond (also a mathdesign font).

Computer Modern

I find Computer Modern to be quite readable on paper and screen. Any particular reason you feel this way?