The Scourge?

My friend Ben Adlin, who is very interested in typography and design, tagged an article for me on del.icio.us called The Scourge of Arial, written by Mark Simonson.

Needless to say it’s a very interesting history of Helvetica, Arial, and fonts on the modern computer. But my first question from the title is “why is Arial a scourge?” I’m really no typographer, so Arial has always looked like a perfectly good font to me, and I’ve certainly used it in web-design before (although my current favorites are Trebuchet MS (seen here) and Verdana (seen everywhere else)).

The problem is that the article never really answers the question. I understand and appreciate the history of Helvetica, and how Arial seems to have emerged as a replacement because of convenience and economics, but I don’t see how that necessarily makes it a poor typeface.

Simonson does note that:

To professional designers, Arial is looked down
on as a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer
fashionable. It has what you might call a “low-end stigma.”

But from a purely aesthetic perspective, is Arial really that ugly? Or is it just a matter of class?