Amen to this. A skilled designer adds a lot of value by setting the type weight and kerning properly, choosing a decent color palette, giving you the right options for light / dark backgrounds and so on.

As important is a basic style guide/manual for the rest of your stuff (use these styles for h1, h2, h3, bullets like so etc).

As a formerly design-blind hacker, I've come to appreciate that consistency in visual design is significantly under-valued.

Absolutely. The idea was that it's a great starting place for someone to look at a heap of fonts and get a feel for what they like. It certainly was not meant as the end point for the logo. I wonder if there's some sort of smart kerning algo we could bang on each logo.