The article goes into well-written details of why what you suggested here was tried and didn't work. 1) they also wanted print fonts, 2) they made a bitmap font but it didn't scale right, 3) people want a large variety of font forms, which they couldn't provide. 4) At the OS level, what do you map your key to, if the character code doesn't exist? 5) Applications chose different, incompatible key-bindings, and 6) for the entire country?

There's also a difference between making a font and making a good, generally usable font, just like I as a 7th grader could program, but they weren't good, generally usable programs.