See, that’s just what I was talking about - I could stare at that image for hours, trying to decide which font is better. Who needs that?
But it’s very clear for me:
TIMES NEW ROMAN - I want to render conformity and no surprise.
CAMBRIA - I want to introduce a little variation that can go unnoticed.
GEORGIA - It allows me to add some style while people may think I stick with conformity.
GARAMOND - It often allows me to save space while still giving the impression that I stick with conformity.
For some more totally standard typefaces, you could consider the Legibility Group
and variants/derivatives…
Awful for legibility though, as your sample demonstrates. The ‘x’ height is too small.
I’d suggest that these days, “font” and “typeface” are synonymous. There was a time when professional designers made a distinction, and it was the correct distinction; but with the arrival of desktop publishing (FrameMaker, Word Perfect, MS Word, even PowerPoint), which amateurs could use and get reasonable results, “font” became the same as “typeface”: “Hey, have you seen that MS Word 6.0 has 23 fonts?” “Don’t you mean ‘typefaces’?” “I dunno–the manual calls them fonts.”
It was an uphill battle with co-workers who were not designers, who had never studied design, but who were being told by their software programs that they had “fonts.”
Should we now discuss the difference between calligraphic “hands” and “alphabets”? 
More to the subject of the OP, I was always taught that there two basic letterforms: text and display. Text letterforms would include those that are easily read when they are used in large chunks of text, as in a book, magazine or newspaper. Times Roman, Garamond, Caslon (“when in doubt, use Caslon” as I was once told), Helvetica, even Optima, fit the bill here. There are others, of course, but the point is: you use these for long text items.
Display typefaces, on the other hand, are used sparingly, and are meant to stand out. They might be a headline (Impact), a movie marquee (Wagner Zip-Change), a movie poster (Malificient), signs posted publicly (Gill Sans or Toronto Subway), or something as simple as a title in a magazine (Americana and Baskerville and Cooper work well here); but the important thing is that they are not to be used as text. Why? Because if you set the text of a magazine article in any of the above, most readers will give up by the end of the first paragraph–reading such typefaces is too much work, except in small doses.
An old friend and teacher used to do well doing the lettering for Harlequin romances and similar bodice-rippers. A fine copperplate calligraphic hand was usually the basis, with an Italic bent, and plenty of swashes. But only three or four words, for the cover of the book. She was equally capable at rendering Times Roman, Garamond, and other text typefaces by hand. And she always said, “Don’t use text faces for display, and don’t use display faces for text.” Her advice has served me well over the years.
Not necessarily. Assuming that each block of text uses the same point size (and I’m not entirely sure that they are), then there are two problems with the sample that I can see.
First of all, the text is center-justified. That’s going to create rivers that distort the block of text as a whole. All samples are distorted because of center-justification, so let’s left-justify them all, and see what happens then.
Next, what level of leading is being used? I’m not entirely sure that each face in the sample uses the same, so we should standardize those as well. Doing so will help with comparisons of the x-height.
Only when we’ve standardized the samples, and are assured that the samples have been standardized, can we make a call as to legibility. FWIW, I have no problems with the legibility of the Garamond sample.
In general there are not problems, I think. 
Garamond’s small x height isn’t opinion, it’s a fact, regardless of the sample posted.
I read once that the official font of the supreme court was Century. I figure that it is meant to make large passages of text readable to older eyes. I’ve since adopted it as the official font for my consulting company which produces large passages of text for older eyes.
Any chance I can get you font geeks to discuss it? It never seems to make it into these conversations about types of font for some reason.
I just tried to grab a sample off the internet but I couldn’t find regular Microsoft century.
My personal opinion is that Bookman Old Style is a bit more appropriate for your purposes.
Here is a comparison between Century and Bookman Old Style: