Best practice for kerning? (opens in new tab)

The biggest issue in font design seems to be kerning. I spend about eight times longer messing around with kerning than I do with actually making the design. Kerning is always the first thing that gets criticised; and the inevitability of 'missing one' is a huge frustration. What's the best way to ensure decent kerning? FontLab's automatic kerning of certain pairs (but not all pairs) is 'non-optimal' – but it strikes me that kerning is exactly the sort of thing that computers ought to be doin...