This line of reasoning implies there's a benefit in such economy and simplification. But is this really so? Take fonts, for example. One could argue that it wou

This line of reasoning implies there's a benefit in such economy and simplification. But is this really so? Take fonts, for example. One could argue that it would be better to have a single font and then maybe also simplify it to have fewer character shapes and width variations. But from what I see font development goes in an entirely different direction. There's more fonts developed every year, and they're getting more sophisticated, not less: they have much more ligatures, different variants of the same letter for different context, and so on. Or take the ideographic writing systems. There were many attempts to simplify them, limit the number of ideographs, simplify their shapes, but as the result we now have two Chinese writing systems (simplified and not) and the simplification of Japanese seems to have stopped and even went backward. Maybe it's not that simple to simplify things :)