There are additional rules for non-optional ligatures hinting the pronunciation which sometimes must be used and sometimes must not; see my post at > https://n

There are additional rules for non-optional ligatures hinting the pronunciation which sometimes must be used and sometimes must not; see my post at > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7944134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7944134 Indeed your argument shows that long s and pronunciation-hinting ligatures are not strictly necessary. But neither are high-level languages for programming (you could code anything, say in C or assembler). Nevertheless most programmers prefer using higher-level languages over C or assembler, because they implement desirable features. So why not use a writing system which already implements such nice features by construction?