[omnimus]

One important detail is that fonts themselves have their own hinting rendering tables so authors can decide how fonts will be rendered on low dpi screens. This is tedious and expensive. And you guessed it many libre fonts simply dont do it right or have capacity to do it at all.

Thats why there can be quite big quality jump when you compare it to fonts from big design teams from Apple or Microsoft. Not only the font might be a bit worse, the rendering/hinting is often way worse.

[layer8]

Exactly. This is why whenever the release of a new font is being posted here (usually coding fonts), I end up being not interested due to the lack of pixel-level hinting.