Windows 8.1 blurry scaling [SOLVED]

With a high-DPI display, you will likely have the display scaled to 125% or 150%. Windows may set it to this automatically (as the recommended setting).

Not sure if Windows 10 has the same problem, but on Windows 8.1 when you scale to 125% the default way, the text may appear dark and blurry.

Warning: Set your browser zoom level to 100% to ensure the screenshots below are not scaled by your browser, or else they won't look right!  Even better, right-click save each file and view them outside your browser!!

Here is an example dialog with no scaling (i.e., 100%):

Now if I set the scaling to larger (125%) as shown here:

Then the dialog looks like this:

The text is dark and blurry.  And no amount of adjusting ClearType will fix it.

But there is a very simple fix!  Check the "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays", as shown here:

Then the dialog looks like this:

Viola!  Scaled beautifully and crystal clear.

Why does Windows choose an awful, blurry scaling over beautiful, clear scaling?  I realize that the default scaling is more advanced in that it handles displays with different DPIs by automatically scaling differently on each monitor.  But does that mean it has to be ugly?

Even if that were true, there is still no excuse for doing the ugly scaling when all of my monitors are the exact same size and exact same resolution.  Windows should detect that and choose to do the good scaling, just as if I had checked the "Let me choose one scaling..." checkbox.

This is why I really don't understand Microsoft.