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I think you overestimate how closely "the masses" pay attention to fonts. (Unless you're talking about "the masses" of programmers and designers, which actually is still a healthy chunk of Ubuntu's potential market at this point.) Yeah ok the hinting isn't so great and Bitstream Vera Sans is a little too wide but it's not THAT bad.

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I should have been clearer - most programmers i know are happy to try out the various font customization techniques and some of them accept it even - by "masses" i meant the large number of people who have used a computer(primarily Windows) before and are willing to give Ubuntu a try, but they do not want or know how-to fiddle with font customizations. This group of people is the natural customer for Ubuntu and i believe the vast majority of them go back to their previous O.S simply because the default fonts for them are not Windows-like. My point is Ubuntu would better serve its "natural customer" by focussing on making the O.S look good for this group of people i.e. look Windows-like by default, rather than other newer features.

The masses still use Comic Sans for presentations. They don't really know or care what that serif/sans business is all about and they definitely don't care about the default font. As bad as it is, that's what I see all around.

But I'm not sure what is the problem with font customisation you're referring to. There's a dialog with 4 basic choices (from "blurry" to "crisp, subpixel) and another dialog for fine tuning where you see examples for every single option. How can it be simpler?

Just because people don't know anything about fonts doesn't mean they don't recognize when something looks nice.

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