> I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".
I strongly disagree. The simplified/traditional split is not the first time new character sets have been introduced. This has happened many times throughout the history of written Chinese. E.g. ever wonder why things that have to do with body parts and organs have a moon radical associated with them? That's because of a conflation of two separate radicals (moon radical and meat radical) that were distinct in Qin Dynasty seal script. And yet this doesn't mean that our Classical Chinese works are all of a sudden written in a different language when written in modern standard script or Han Dynasty clerical script or even seal script (which in turn is definitely _not_ the original script that these works were written in).
Moreover the vast vast majority of differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters are one-to-one mappings between different characters. While simplified Chinese characters sometimes map multiple traditional Chinese characters to a single simplified one, the reverse direction also happens! See e.g. 乾 which is split into 干 and 乾 depending on meaning and pronunciation.
> Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese.
The fact that a single character can have different pronunciations and different meanings which can coincide or not among different varieties of Chinese has endured for as long as we've had written records of non-standard Chinese varieties. This is not something new with simplified characters.
At a higher level, there has been a split in Chinese between officially sanctioned characters and non-standard variant characters since the first unification of characters under the Qin dynasty (which characters are sanctioned has changed over time). Traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese characters are simply changes in which characters receive official sanction.
Basically at the end of the day the simplified/traditional split is nothing new in Chinese, it's happened many times before and it's very easy to learn one if one knows the other.