For a good font—not some crap on DaFont—you're talking many, many thousands of hours. Often just one person's labour, often by eye. Software makes it a little bit easier, but you're still kerning every single possible character combination by eye, and you're still redrawing glyphs at every possible size to make sure they don't render like shit.

There are lots of dinosaurs in typography—Linotype etc—but the best studios are tiny. Some great links to great studios here: http://jessicahische.is/thinkingthoughts