[dfc]

I am not sure why you think you should just replace dlig with clig? Did you want the discretionary ligatures? Which of the contextual ligatures do you want? In my opinion it is the discretionary and the historic ligatures that are distracting and gaudy. I you can not think of the specific ligatures you want from the discretionary/contextual/historic why not just stick with the basics provided in liga?

This is going to sound crazy: Does anyone know the name of the js/css development website that has three or four panes and lets you mock up things on screen. There is probably more than one. I can not think of the name right now for the life of me. I always see it linked to when people are doing demonstrations here on HN.

I put up an image here of your defaults with your fonts and mine:

https://imgur.com/a/x44Wq

My default font is Minion Pro and you can see the extra discretionaries in words like "spurred, directed, testing, etc." The one goofy css test that I found did not let me choose any web fonts so I could not check your garamond but I did check my local Garamond Pro. and all of the same discretionary ligatures are present in my local garamond.