I was reading an old TUGboat article about "sensible defaults" where the author set \tolerance to 250 and no \emergencystretch or \hfuzz.

Now, my columns usually end up being around 55-65 characters wide, which isn't that wide, but in any longer text I'm lucky if I can stay under badness 1000 in underfull \hboxs. Some of those can be hyphenated or otherwise manipulated away, but 250 is hard to reach.

Is this just me? I'm curious where you usually land with \tolerance and badness? (For comparison maybe also mention the width of your paragraphs?)