anti-aliasing nightmare on debian

Debian mysteriously turned on font-anti-aliasing when I upgraded my laptop a few days ago. I guess that's fine, but suddenly my terminal got completely unreadable.
before


after


I thought about turning it antialiasing off -- and I still may -- but it occurred to me that I could probably do better.
I asked around, and I found a few shootouts, including Jeff Atwood's, but none for my exact setup.
The problem is, Linux/X11's font renderer isn't really ClearType. Also, different applications seem to render the same font different ways: VIM and Gnome Terminal sometimes show the same character in the same font in a dramatically different way.

Now I've got a handful of beautiful monospace fonts, but I can't seem to decide which to use. I'll post some examples here, as I get time to make screenshots.

So far, I've got:

• Andale Mono
• Consolas
• Consolas
• DejaVu Sans
• Inconsolata
• TheSans Mono
• Bitstream Vera

I don't have Monoco or Pragmata, but maybe I'll find them later.