I spent the last 4 years in Taiwan, although I also lived in China for 5 months before that.

Traditional characters are easier to read, in my opinion. There's more radicals to guess the meaning. I can also use my program https://pingtype.github.io to decompose the character if I write it wrong.

Simplifying the number of strokes made it faster to write. This helped literacy because the education system is built on copying characters by rote - a terrible method, in my opinion. I prefer reading in parallel, with the pinyin and literal translations below (also in Pingtype).

What Chinese really needs, and doesn't contradict the history, is spaces between words. Imaginehavingtoreadenglishwithoutanypunctuationandyoullsurelyrecognisethatitsabarriertolearning.