Our typefaces for the web are auto-hinted, the only realistic possibility for smaller foundries. We hint them with all possible auto-hinting tools and then decide which one looks best (per style) across all rendering environments. The results will never be perfect, but absolutely acceptable across a large number of rendering environments and type sizes used.
No auto-hinted font is going to look perfect at 8px sizes, for that you absolutely need hand-hinted fonts (and even then they look like crap). But hand-hinting a font costs thousands of dollars per style – or about $50 per character, more or less. Only big foundries and operating system providers like Microsoft can do that. GT Sectra for example contains around 900 glyphs per style, across 30 styles.
Additionally, the whole industry is moving away from manual hinting, as more and more high-dpi devices are on the market, and operating systems’ rendering of typefaces becomes less and less dependent on hinting information (OS X ignores it completely, for example). It’s just not an investment that’s really worth it going forward.
You can see GT Sectra in small use for example in use on http://reportagen.com – and it holds up pretty decently in my opinion. Or don’t you think?