Although you put something to extremity, I agree with most of this post. I did tune much according to your post with fonts.conf, yet finally I just use the easiest way: choose “best contrast” (which means gray-scale, hinting full), I thus turned off rgb hinting and use only gray-scale hinting and I’m rather happy. Being a gdi++ fan, I still think there’s huge job left for Linux developers, though.

Thanks.