[kevbin]

"Just a tweak" minimizes the work necessary to make typefaces (especially monospaced typefaces) produce good results. The hinting in Menlo seems to produce really good on-screen results on my Mac; preferable to Consolas, Liberation, BVSM, Pragmata, etc.

[tptacek]

Not to disparage the people who worked hard on hinting Menlo, but I'm not sure that's work comparable to designing an entire major face family.

[kevbin]

It's a different kind of work. I've purchased several typefaces with beautiful letterforms that are useless for coding on my mac because they are not hinted or hinted poorly. A couple more have really bad metrics that the "height"/"width" sliders can't really compensate for in the terminal.