And as for Arial, most of the attitude directed towards it is nothing more than anti-Microsoft snobbishness.
You might be surprised how many people prefer 17pt comic sans to the crisp 7pt pale-gray-on-white designers usually label "joy to read" or "beautiful".
Perhaps because they are actually neither and many designers are not well-versed in typography. Making text beautiful (but not necessarily readable) is design; making text readable (but not necessarily beautiful) is typography. They of course, overlap, and good typography usually looks good as well.
I disagree. Arial features some truly revolting glyphs. The R being the worst offender. Probably of any font I can think of. The G is also pretty disgusting.
On the other hand I find it hard to make something look bad using only Helvetica.