… there are plenty of commercial fonts that suck. Easily 30–40% of commercial fonts leave me thoroughly unimpressed. If you look at libre fonts, and use the Google Fonts collection as your baseline, maybe 65% of those fonts suck. If you just look at all free fonts on dafont, maybe 95% of those fonts stink.

… most of the people who are capable of making high quality fonts have some serious training, and/or a fair bit of experience. The people who are at a stage of their career where they are interested in making stuff and willing and able to give it away are mostly younger people just starting out, or people just beginning to get really into type design. On average they have a lot less experience and skill.

Plus, polishing a font until it is really good is a whole lot of extra work and a lot less fun than the earlier stages of the design process. Frankly, it’s the 80/20 rule, only with type it is more like 90/10 or 95/5. Most of the quality improvement won’t be immediately/consciously noticed by most potential users, especially in the new growth area of the web where would-be end users are generally less typographically savvy.

Thomas Phinney.