Fonts were a problem for LaTeX in the early days, because Mr. Knuth invented his own (high quality) system to describe fonts.
Later (with PDFlatex, I guess) it became possible to use PostScript fonts directly.
But PS fonts are expensive, and on Windows PostScript fonts were never really used widely.
And then Microsoft "invented" TrueType fonts... 

With ubiquitous cheap (and not always high quality) TTFs there was a growing need to use TTF in LaTeX: It seems like pdflatex can make use of fonts in the TTF format, but I have not tried it myself.

TODAY luatex/lualatex can not only use TTF but also the even newer OTF fonts with very little problems. It works, but ...

The goal of (La)TeX was to produce HIGH QUALITY documents, that's why the default is EXTREMELY high quality and changing things is hard.
With Microsoft products it is the rule to produce VERY LOW QUALITY documents and it is easy to change things to "comic sans" or worse...

Well, with luatex I now can take part in the low quality document revolution. ;-)