were pretty much like that... and they used typesetters to figure out the best way to lay them out so they'd be easy to read and easy to use.

Well designed text layouts and badly designed text layouts for that sort of screen were prevalent, and were looked at as a design problem. That's about putting text into a space, and that is typesetting. Given the parameters of a problem, a competent typesetter would most definitely not laugh them out of the room... unless of course they'd been expected to work for free.