I did a lot of setting posters in serif type a year ago or so and came to the conclusion that most tools do a horrible job of kerning.

It did not seem so bad to me at any point in the past (making posters for a college radio station in the early 1990s, making posters for the Green Party in the early 2000s, etc.) I don't know if I got pickier or if a patent war caused regressions in most text rendering systems. I figured out how to manually kern in Powerpoint (awkward but I can get great results) and also a bunch of options in Illustrator that improve things but still require a manual kerning to look right consistently.

I look around and don't see a lot of people setting posters with Serifed fonts and I think it may be that people see they look awful and don't have the knowledge or time to do anything about kerning.