Can you explain why (traditional/simplified) chinese is that bad?
Because ideograms are a particularly silly way of writing things down, very hard to learn (even for native speakers), and do not mesh well with computers, and generally any form of storage/writing other than scribbling them by hand.
It's no coincidence that there were numerous attempts in the history of countries who have adopted Chinese writing system to move away from it to improve literacy rates for common people. Koreans have done that with Hangul, and even Chinese themselves came up with a simplified script under commies to make learning more manageable. But it's still fundamentally a mess, and I see alphabetic and syllabic writing systems as vastly superior.
Then also, of course I'm biased towards my own culture, which means that I prefer Latin/Greek or something derived from them. Though I do find Hangul very neat, and wouldn't mind using it just because it's so well designed.
Very hard to learn - yes!
Mesh quite well with computers, provided you use an auxiliary input system. Seems to me most people learn an alpabeth script for that use.
And there are Hangul, and other systems in other countries, created to suplement chinese ideograms. As for literacy of the common people, are you sure anybody cared? More than they cared about being Modern (Western) and stopping Chinese imperialism?
Both Korea and Vietnam have abandoned Chinese ideograms in modern times, are there others? Do you have examples that precede western influence?
For those who don't know: Please note that the creation of Hangul, and in some sense the Japanese kanas, seriously predates western influence in the region, but they were (are) use intermixed with Chinese Ideograms. (I believe Vietnamese had some such system too, but now they use an alphabeth.)
