As the only oldstyle font in the "original 35" Postscript desktop publishing fonts (think "original seven" Mercury astronauts), Palatino saw overuse. Among some designers it's second only to Comic Sans for its amateur use infamy.

I'm among the guilty. Palatino does appear spread out compared to alternatives, for better or worse.

The article does note that Palatino was originally designed for display text. I had long heard that Hermann Zapf was horrified at its adoption as a body font, which I couldn't confirm. The best I could do was to find a quote,

"One day I got up the nerve to ask 'Mr Zapf, what do you do?' He replied, 'I correct the errors of my youth.'"