Yes! That's a lot better IMO, but I suspect that the reason for the custom string with single letter "operators" is because the size overhead was unbearable for

Yes! That's a lot better IMO, but I suspect that the reason for the custom string with single letter "operators" is because the size overhead was unbearable for SVGs with complex paths (which, being a vector format, should be considered the baseline). The overhead is already pretty massive with the current spec, gzipped you can usually divide the file size by an order of magnitude. I SVG is pretty inelegant, but it's pragmatical.