Have you seen this thread on hinting?
I also came to the conclusion that hinting is not that useful. Adding a greyscale table is almost as good. At very small sizes, greyscale smoothed fonts look much the same as hinted fonts. Where hinted fonts are best seems to be at the widely used sizes between 10 and 12 points, where unhinted greyscale fonts are a bit light or fuzzy, and unhinted fonts without greyscale suffer from “dropout” or missing thin strokes.
When I’m working, I always zoom in to enlarge small fonts because anything less than about 16 points is too small to read comfortably on screen for long periods.Then the unhinted fonts look better than hinted fonts.