What was Knuth's complaint about phototypesetting? I know nothing about this, but isn't the problem that TeX solves that of layout of characters? Which seems like it would still need to be done by either hand or electronically for phototypesetting.
The fonts weren't as good, even the best that Addison-Wesley could come up with.
“I didn’t know what to do. I had spent 15 years writing those books, but if they were going to look awful I didn’t want to write any more.” (Digital Typography, p. 5)
Knuth started his TeX-and-METAFONT typography project in order to specify the appearance of his books; he wrote TeX so that he could use METAFONT. The former turns out to be useful even without the latter.
