>Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter.
I consider it near to an optima for encoding English in particular. A different spoken language, which might carry a different amount of bits per symbol, would be best encoded by a different writing system. I'm sure Cyrillic is near optimal for encoding Russian. I don't know enough to tell you how to break Cyrillic into k segments and still have it be recognizable, but it can probably be done.
>There's a whole lot amount of information you can embed into the way you write/draw your letters, even in the density/dryness variation of ink and the variation of size, inclination, padding, etc.
This is one of those claims like "most communication is non-verbal". But really, what's the bit rate of information encoded in writing style? You say "a whole lot amount of information", but how many bits is a whole lot? And in any case, how much of that subtle, undocumented writing feature would one expect to find in a given document throughout history? Were the monks and scribes and masons who were commissioned to inscribe all the civic and religious texts also inscribing all that subtext, or was their handwriting style the result of trying to write as quickly and efficiently as they could manage? Obviously it was the latter.
To say the 7 segment display is an accident is to miss the point. No matter what engineers might think is desirable, there was no a priori reason to think that letters with all their different curves and forms would be compressible. We could have ended up in the reality where there was no way to display the letters of the alphabet other than pixel by pixel at high resolution. It could have been that each letter was as unique as a QR code, and anything less than transcription of each black and white dot would fail to suffice. But we didn't end up in that reality. We ended up in the reality where all the information needed to discern the character compresses down to 7 bits, and that's just slightly more than the 5.64 bits represented by the character itself.
>It's reductionist such as saying
Well call me a reductionist then.
>And what if we had a different system that 7-segment display?
I couldn't agree more. Flag semaphores make use of two flags held at up to 8 different angles (up, down, left, right, and all 4 diagonals). That gives a code space of 8 choose 2 which is 28. Adapting a similar system for an alphabet would be ideal. Every letter is just two strokes, one coming from the edge into the center point followed by another from that center point to a different edge. Alphabetical order would be easy to remember since it would work exactly the same as hands ticking on a clock. The alphabet could easily expand with 3 or 4 handed characters if needed. The positions of the some of the segments could encode information such as "this is a vowel" or "this is a grammatical particle" making the system that much easier to learn. The system would obviously lend itself to sign language making it more practical to communicate with deaf people.