> Surely antialiasing makes hinting unnecessary.
It doesn't. "Antialiasing makes hinting unnecessary" is simply wrong as a general statement: hinting definitely makes a difference and improves clarity at lower scaling factors like 125%. Try comparing a 1px stem snapped to pixel grid and another centered on the boundary of a pixel; there's no way the latter would look as sharp as the former. Maybe I should have said "aliasing artifacts": the fact that it is sampled twice (once while rendering the glyph and once while rescaling the image) introduces more distortion and is inherently worse than rendering directly at the target resolution.
