Thanks for this great comment!
The motivation behind METAFONT is amusing to me because it seems to have some of the same hubris of the most extreme AI proponents nowadays: we can replace art by technology. I'm fascinated with TeX (and have spent a lot of my life rewriting it http://github.com/jamespfennell/texcraft) but I always found the situation with fonts in the TeX ecosystem a bit odd. There are people in our society whose vocation is font design (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Slimbach). But the TeX ecosystem landed in a place where we use fonts created by computer scientists rather than font designers.
The idea wasn't to replace type designers, but to create a new tool for artists to use.
I had a slightly different reaction, though I'm only going by what I read in this thread. It wasn't to replace art with technology for everyone, but to scratch a personal itch. He liked the artist-made typography just fine, but it was going away regardless and that was demotivating to him. I think this is in the finest tradition of hacks, even if it took decades.
The first METAFONT was Computer Modern, which (short version) was a re-creation of Monotype 8A.