Plus, while there are a lot of 'free' fonts online most of them are licensed such that you can't embed them in your app. From my understanding (IANAL) the SIL open font licence DOES allow you to embed and redistribute.

No problem. I think any field that has a community of people devoted to it full time gets pretty intense after awhile. If you're still curious, check out some hangouts for type designers, like http://typophile.com/