Yes it matters. I didn't say anything about a standard. I don't mean that "there isn't an agreed upon notation that Deaf Americans use to write ASL", I mean "we

Yes it matters. I didn't say anything about a standard. I don't mean that "there isn't an agreed upon notation that Deaf Americans use to write ASL", I mean "we don't have a good way represent signs that allows us to search with that representation, apply phonological rules, and synthesize signs from that representation". We have all sorts of representations for spoken speech---a waveform, spectrogram, vocal tract models, IPA--and these all get used in a speech recognition (or synthesis) system. For ASL we have movies, still-image cartoons that depict motion, categories for some parameters like handshape, some linguistic insights, and I'm not sure what else.