Admittedly, the choice of "stroke" definition is an imperfect measure of the cost to write each letter (see my comment above).

Even if you want readability to weigh more heavily than writability into the optimization, wouldn't you agree that increasing writability, at no cost to readability, would be good (it's a "Pareto improvement")? This is the point of the concluding section, which discusses swapping the meaning of existing letters.

Yeah. The most common letters should prioritize clarity not ease of handwriting. As such the symbol for e seems like a pretty good choice.