> Any amount of overhang is too much. It makes the edge of the container look bumpy and messy
Quite the opposite. When you look at most fonts in detail, the topmost parts of e.g. AEO will differ slightly; this is because visually, the pointed top of the A has much less 'mass' than the flat bar that is the top of E; the O will be higher than the top of the E bar as well. The same applies to the left and right edges; it's not a matter of taste, it's physiological. In so far a truly 'optical margin' or whatever Adobe chose to call it would have to take into account the shape of each singly glyph, not only punctuation. Quotes are only always mentioned because they're the most obvious application; full stops, commas, hyphens—all of these dittels have a minimum of 'flesh' and should therefore be pushed further than, say, an X or an M.
But I agree that putting a double quote 100% outside the left margin is a bit too much of a good thing; my guess is that it should be more like 50% or somesuch to avoid the "bumpy and messy"ness that you rightly dislike.
The idea that overshoots are necessary to create the appearance of equal height is a myth; you can see for yourself that they are clearly visible as irregularities when you run your eye along the baseline, mean line, or cap line.
Man you're doing it wrong. You're like that guy in the old MAD Magazine cartoon who wants to look at the mountains with a binocular but happens to see his wife's face in ultra-macro and goes "eew mountains are gross".
It's not like typographers can't see that these orderly lines that you crave are 'overshot' by the glyphs, they sure do! And it's not necessarily an effect that works at constant ratio for every magnification either; the overshoot in a font intended for footnotes is probably different from the overshoot in a font designed to be displayed a meter high on the sides of a van.
In your other comment you say it's a 'holdover' from metal type. "Holdover" is such a dog whistle word you know, it always comes from people who want to do away with accumulated wisdom, who claim that "we can do this better now" (i.e. now that we have digitized every aspect of life); they more often than not are not willing and not prepared to recognize Chesterton's fence, they just want to rid the world of any kind of perceived messiness. All lines must be straight.
Other than that, there certainly are details in type design that are there solely to accommodate for hot metal typesetting, but overshoot as such is not. And your super-macro-closeups aren't proof of anything, they just demonstrate that overshoots are big enough to be clearly seen when enlarged. Type designers have been aware of this fact for centuries. Also, as for the https://live.staticflickr.com/5300/5482446696_1fa1ff2b45_b.j... one, where you write "Hideous. Try to follow that baseline with your eye. It's a roller coaster of chaos." that's just you disliking a type design that is somewhat playful.
You prolly dislike cursive handwriting for all the same reasons. You do you, but BRRRR.
I doubt the designer of the font in that image was trying to make the letters look different sizes for fun. If that was the goal, though — great, mission accomplished!
You say it's wrong to judge overshoots by these examples because the text is too large. Okay. Show me an example of appropriately sized type that looks more _uniformly sized_ with overshoots than without, and I'll agree with you. (Remember, the justification for overshoots is uniform optical size, not playfulness!)
First off the bat, I dislike the FedEX typography at least as much as you; it is not a very sensibly, sensitively done design. With that out of the way, let me start with a few quotes.
The first emphasizes that overshoot is just one of many aspects of typography that require the designer to tweak forms; the platonic, geometric ideal has to be adapted to the realities of human perception:
Typefaces are born from the struggle between rules and results. Squeezing a square about 1% helps it look more like a square; to appear the same height as a square, a circle must be measurably taller. The two strokes in an X aren't the same thickness, nor are their parallel edges actually parallel; the vertical stems of a lowercase alphabet are thinner than those of its capitals; the ascender on a d isn't the same length as the descender on a p, and so on. For the rational mind, type design can be a maddening game of drawing things differently in order to make them appear the same.—Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones [1]
This fact has been well known the world over and throughout the ages; for example, in the game of go, the stones, which are black and white, are of slightly different sizes (black slightly larger), to give the appearance of being the same size [1]
Likewise the Parthenon in Athens: "[The Greeks] achieved global perfection through deliberate departure from local precision. Minor geometric irregularities were incorporated by the architects to enhance the beauty of the building. It is paradoxical that these modifications create the impression of great geometric perfection, even though they involve deliberate departures from strict regularity." [2]
As for type design, the maybe most geometric-in-appearance modern typeface in wide use, Futura by Paul Renner (1927) is not perfectly geometric: The design of Futura [...] makes subtle departures from pure geometric designs that allow the letterforms to seem balanced. This is visible in the apparently almost perfectly round stroke of the o, which is nonetheless slightly ovoid, and in how the circular strokes of letters like b gently thin as they merge with the verticals. Renner's biographer Christopher Burke has noted the important role of the Bauer Foundry's manufacturing team in adapting the design for different sizes of text, a feature not seen in digital releases.
As becomes evident from the last sentence and as is widely known by graphic designers, many / most digital typefaces forego adaptation to different perceived sizes (I'd say that is one major culprit in what makes the FedEX logo so awkward: they just took a design that would have worked well for a magazine headline and blew it up to cover a room-sized area). In so far overshoots are not a holdover from metal type; rather, digital type through it's negligence of established designer sensibilities has produced awkward and ugly results that more traditional craftspeople would've been ashamed of (this BTW is quite parallel to the discussion around putting two spaces after the full stop).
I refuse to show you another image to which you will doubtlessly just reply "meh, overshoot bad". It's also a matter of taste.
Quite the opposite. When you look at most fonts in detail, the topmost parts of e.g. AEO will differ slightly; this is because visually, the pointed top of the A has much less 'mass' than the flat bar that is the top of E; the O will be higher than the top of the E bar as well. The same applies to the left and right edges; it's not a matter of taste, it's physiological. In so far a truly 'optical margin' or whatever Adobe chose to call it would have to take into account the shape of each singly glyph, not only punctuation. Quotes are only always mentioned because they're the most obvious application; full stops, commas, hyphens—all of these dittels have a minimum of 'flesh' and should therefore be pushed further than, say, an X or an M.
But I agree that putting a double quote 100% outside the left margin is a bit too much of a good thing; my guess is that it should be more like 50% or somesuch to avoid the "bumpy and messy"ness that you rightly dislike.