It seems like a little bit weird to have ligatures in a monospaced font. The whole reason ligatures exist is so that bits of letterforms in closely-spaced type

It seems like a little bit weird to have ligatures in a monospaced font. The whole reason ligatures exist is so that bits of letterforms in closely-spaced type don't crash. That shouldn't happen in a monospace font. If you're just changing the space so that two characters are grouped as a kind of unit, that to me defeats the purpose of using monospace to begin with.