Yes I agree, to a first approximation that's true. Dave Crossland (another computer programmer who works with typography) has said similar stuff: https://www.yo

Yes I agree, to a first approximation that's true. Dave Crossland (another computer programmer who works with typography) has said similar stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwPObPbk90I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwPObPbk90I, http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/24/why-metafont-didnt-catch-on/ http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/24/why-metafont-didn..., https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93crossland.pdf https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93crossland.pdf, https://speakerdeck.com/davelab6/anrt-2016-why-didnt-metafont-catch-on https://speakerdeck.com/davelab6/anrt-2016-why-didnt-metafon... This is related to the "thinking with shapes" versus "thinking about shapes" comment. But looking more closely, there were a few people who made fonts with Metafont: Georgia Tobin, Neenie Billawala etc. made a few, as did a lot of people working with non-Latin scripts: e.g. Frans Velthuis and Charles Wikner made really nice Devanagari fonts. (See "The Many Faces of TeX" for Metafont-fonts as of 1988: https://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb09-2/tb21wujastyk.pdf https://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb09-2/tb21wujastyk.pdf -- that was probably their peak though.) Still you're right, no "mainstream" type designers switched over.