No no no, that's bullshit. A properly designed font isn't just the outlines, it's the outlines + spacing. Type designers spend almost as many hours perfecting the built in kerning as they do creating the outlines themselves, because the space is integral to the font as a whole.

Yes there are times, especially with display type, that you want to adjust the kerning between a few pairs of glyphs, but to say to "never trust a font to provide your kerning" suggests to me that you use a lot of poorly designed free fonts rather than professionally realized typefaces from reputable font foundries.

I would love it if the browsers would all support the built in kerning in a font by default, with a way to override it manually.