Cursive is so problematic in the US not because it is hard to learn, useless, or requires a massive investment of time. It is problematic because we are terrible at teaching handwriting!
Almost all US schools have standardized on forms of looped cursive (e.g. Parker Penmanship, Zaner-Bloser) -- a set of letterforms designed not for handwriting, but for the movable type printing press! Looped cursive was made to be attractive with the fewest unique joins possible so that printers needed to stock fewer pieces for their movable type presses. Looped cursive is slower, less legible, and more difficult to learn than forms of writing actually made to be written (such as cursive italic).
Additionally, almost all US schools not only require that young children learning to write use pencil, but a relatively hard lead (HB lead). These pencils require too much pressure to use, and catch on the paper too much, making it much harder to learn to write properly -- especially in cursive, which has fewer lifts.
When I began using fountain pens, and learned to write in cursive italic, my handwriting became effortlessly quick and neat. My RSI even improved! This is how I taught my son to write, and he has arguably the best writing in his first-grade class, despite a severe speech disability which caused a delay in his learning to read and write.
We aren't the only family who have figured this out -- almost all of the home-schooling families we know use the same cursive italic my son and I learned, and I've seen a couple of private schools adopt it. Right now, it seems that the "cursive revival" seems limited to education-focused families with young children, writers, and doctors, but I think that if more people became aware of exactly how kludgy the writing they were taught is, they might give real handwriting a try and love it as much as we do. :)
Note: The italic and cursive italic we learned was Getty-Dubay italic -- I used the grown-up book "Write Now", and my son is learning with the first-grade book. Their web site is: http://handwritingsuccess.com/