Fair enough. I guess it depends on what the goal for writing systems is: a system that is easy to teach helps increase literacy but that hardly mattered to many

Fair enough. I guess it depends on what the goal for writing systems is: a system that is easy to teach helps increase literacy but that hardly mattered to many empires throughout history who would rather the rabble not be able to read. The fact that alphabets are easier to use for technology like the printing press, telegraph, typewriters, and computers is purely a historical accident. I'm sure you could (if people didn't already) come up with an encoding scheme based on stroke order/position to transmit traditional Chinese over the telegraph so it's not like that was an insurmountable problem. FWIW l I'm a fairly fast reader and I recognize word shapes for regularly used words. Pretty sure that's a common technique regardless of the writing system in use.