Cleartype - do you like it?

[CoffeeFiend]

Cleartype is post-processing of fonts that aren't good to begin with (or they wouldn't require cleartype)

Utter nonsense. Perhaps you don't understand how anti-aliasing works, or how LCD's sub-pixels make up their pixels (rather different than CRTs). What you're saying is 100% the same as saying "this line at a 45 degree angle only needs anti-aliasing because it's badly designed". It simply doesn't work that way.

It makes use of the subpixels to anti-alias fonts FAR better than the old grayscale method which could only do anti-aliasing at the pixel level (more precise/sharper -- and actually a better representation of the font's bezier curves). That alone is quite nice, but the other thing I personally appreciate quite a bit (as a typography lover/geek) is the much improved spacing between characters (far more precise kerning) as you're not forced to stick to actual pixel boundaries for placement (3x more precise, aligning to sub-pixels) which looks fantastic IMO.

It's not something you should rely on, as it is not a reliable standard

It's not what we would call a standard in the first place But it does consistently looks great IMO. And the big name foundries (like Adobe) are also behind those technologies and some even have their own implementation of it (e.g. Adobe's CoolType). You'd think they know a thing or two about type Even Microsoft is quite knowledgeable about fonts in general -- they even designed the OpenType format (the "new" standard) with Adobe and they have came up with several nice fonts over the years too (calibri, candara, segoe, verdana, cambria, trebuchet, etc)