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I wish it was easy enough to derive a Bitcoin address from a private key using pen and paper so that I could just make up a private key, write it down, work out a few details, and then have a Bitcoin address I could provide to anyone... with only human error as a possible problem or attack vector.

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Bitcoin addresses are derived from the public key, which in turn derives from a private key. So you can already do what you propose, as long as your private keys satisfies the strength that Bitcoin requires.

The math is not trivial enough to do with pen and paper.

If it was, how secure would Bitcoin be? How much more vulnerable would it make it to brute-force attacks?

There's nothing stopping you from applying the key derivation algo step by step using a calculator, or an offline computer.

It would make for an insightful, albeit time-consuming, experiment.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/29880

> If it was, how secure would Bitcoin be?

It doesn’t matter how easy/simple it is to derive a public key from a private key. What matters is how easy it is to go in the opposite direction. As your link shows, it’s not that hard to do elliptic curve multiplication by hand, and there’s no need for it to be hard/complex.

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