I share the opinion of many others:

Autonym is actually
a) a fix for a problem that most people never experienced.
b) making thinks even worse as they would have been without ULS and Autonym in the first place


The whole sad story from my point of view:

Common sense dictates that users have fonts installed for their native languages. If they work multilingual they're most likely do also have all fonts necessary for those languages installed on their system. On top of that we can assume that on all modern systems there's support for even more languages that a normal user never ever needs anyway.

Against this common sense ULS was designed to load webfonts for a huge bunch of languages. Therefore we started to load additional font support for every Wikipedia user, even if it was most unlikely that a user actually needed it.

It turned out, that ULS was detrimental to performance. The additional traffic due to webfonts loading seems to have been so large, that even WMF saw the need for a change (I'm quite sure WMF would not have even cared to develop Autonym if it had only affected client performance).

Now we have Autonym, which brings all sorts of problems, including the extremely bad rendering we're discussing in this bug...
And now we're trying hardly to fix font rendering of Autonym (which will by definition never be as good as a native font like Arial on Windows), because we put much effort into Autonym, which was a fix for the bad performance for ULS, which was a huge project supported by WMF which was supposed to fix problems and add features... that users never faced and seldom requested!


The whole thing seems pretty messed up to me, like many things that come from WMF lately. Since I see Siebrand Mazeland is active on this bug (who is the "Product Manager Language Engineering" of the WMF after all and therefore probably the one in charge for everything we're discussing here): Think about the doubts many users have about ULS, Autonym and all the other new language features. And think about why there are no users praising ULS, while there are tons of users facing problems with ULS and everything that is connected to it... I don't want to blame you for doing a bad job - but I'm afraid there is definitely room for improvement right now!