Re: My BigDic sez ...
Oh Gawd, you're causing serious flashbacks here. For my sins I worked for Corel after I graduated uni, mid 90s. The Tech Support people were forever having to explain to customers that just because you got 1,000 fonts in the box, you didn't have to install them all, especially not without installing the free font manager you also got in the box. IIRC, Windows 3 and 95 used to get decidedly ill if you installed more than 500 fonts at a time...
Fonts are a weird business. I can't think of anything that's more labour-intensive and yet as undervalued as creating a good font-- because if you're doing it right, most people won't even notice a well-made one. Yet it will have taken a significant amount of effort-- designing the glyphs, tweaking the kerning pairs, hinting-- all that work that most people won't appreciate, and which can be swiped in seconds by any fecker copying a .ttf or .otf file. You can't even copyright a design (presumably because back in the day copying a font meant actually making your own metal type, in which case good luck to you), hence like you say the number of bootleg almost-but-not-quite-the-same Helveticas knocking about.