I agree. I'm one of those people who is very picky about their fonts, and I can't recall ever paying over $10 for a font for my own, personal, non-design relate

I agree. I'm one of those people who is very picky about their fonts, and I can't recall ever paying over $10 for a font for my own, personal, non-design related needs. In my case, it's due to the fact that I have poor eyesight, so having the right font can really make a big difference, but there are probably thousands of free/low-cost options out there. It was hard to find a monospace font that looked great at larger sizes (14pt), but in the end I settled on Luxi Mono (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Luxi-Mono http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Luxi-Mono). It actually doesn't look that great in their previews, but renders much more smoothly in my editor. This makes me think that the operating system/rendering engine probably plays a bigger role.