Yeah, that's why I'm skeptical about these "almost monospaced" fonts too. In my opinion, the actual problem is sans serif monospaced fonts: there most of the glyphs are sans serif, but then the designers are forced to add serifs only to the narrow glyphs to fill up the available space, so these end up sticking out like sore thumbs. So monospaced fonts that have serifs on all glyphs look much better IMHO.