Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

I agree with you, I myself use pdflatex or xelatex (the latter for unicode support which is indeed the way to go). And metafont was an interesting idea but far too slow because it uses cubic splines and it turns out quadratic (postscript, opentype) is good enough; more so, it doesn't directly render vector font outlines, but generates bitmaps for each size. So I think TeX should be regarded as a frozen base that can be built upon by other projects like luatex and xetex, and metafont is not even used by most TeX projects now and can be regarded as perfect, but dead.