That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok - big websites can afford to pay more, and I wouldn't be surprised if a disproportionate amount of a typeface designer's income will come from a few heavy hitters; so without charging more for big websites, they'd have to raise the price for small ones, pricing hobbyists like me out of the market. Big font companies, though, often require you to install intrusive javascript tracking code to enforce these agreements, which is a step too far for me.
Fonts are pretty much a pure crystallization of the "information wants to be free"/"artists want to be paid" tradeoff. Digital fonts are nothing but information, so it seems absurd to charge more for using them on more websites/in more documents/with a larger team - there's no additional cost being incurred!; but without artificial restrictions on reuse, typeface designers wouldn't get paid at all.
tl;dr You're going to get better treatment and better prices from little one-person font designer shops than from the big companies (Monotype, Hoefler & Co). Unless you're a big co yourself, the OP is right; they're a waste of your time. But the little guys are a decent option, you just have to hunt around.