The biggest reason for MF's not catching on was the lack of immediate visual feedback (the program has hooks for displaying graphic output as it creates bitmaps

The biggest reason for MF's not catching on was the lack of immediate visual feedback (the program has hooks for displaying graphic output as it creates bitmaps, but I never saw them implemented on any platform). Adobe's internal tools (based on illustrator) and later Fontographer were the nails in the coffin. I remember talking about MF with Sumner Stone in 1989 or 1990 and he was blunt about how the Adobe design team considered it a dead end because they needed to directly manipulate the visual representation of the typefaces.