It's not about what can be done, it's about where the ragged edges are, and where the core is. If you put any squiggle in the top of す it will make no sense. But you can do nearly anything you want with the bottom half and it will make sense (like an English 'j'). It's not that the stroke order is sacrosanct - there are indeed a lot of ways to write an 'a' in English. But some of those ways will not be well-read by others. Those regional differences can be really confusing. Ask a french person to write the numbers 1 and 7, and then an American. They are nearly exclusively legible precisely because of their orthographic rules. And yet 'people somehow manage to read'.

The hard and fast rules are prescriptive, but once you start writing, you realize that some of that prescription ends up as description. There really are detectable orthographic differences in how stroke order affects (generally, of course) how people write.

children have penmanship work in the earlier years of learning the chinese language but that stops within a few years. what about all the characters that they pick up after penmanship work ends? there is some intuition to the stroke order that guides the writing of more elaborate characters, that is maybe picked up in the formative years. and the intuition seems extremely consistent among users of the language.

i have not met anyone who did not learn the chinese language without doing penmanship work, and so i cannot say what it means to ignore the stroke order when writing chinese. if one were to pick up the latin alphabet with an unusual stroke order and were to carry that habit to adulthood, will we find his handwriting difficult to read? if he managed to train his hands to write with a most unusual method will he still write perfectly legibly, and can we even distinguish his stroke order if we were to inspect it carefully? i don't know the answer to this. out of curiousity i wrote the alphabet with a totally unfamiliar stroke order (e.g. starting the y's and g's from the bottom) and it looked as if i wrote it with my off hand - unsteady and unpracticed - which seems to suggest that maybe with some effort it could look totally similar. i can believe that without stroke order guidance one could still achieve legible chinese writing.

There are some minor differences in stroke order by region, but the basic rules are always the same (e.g. top before bottom, left before right, etc).

It's genuinely hard to read people's writing if the stroke order is off.

If you write super slowly and deliberately it may not matter much, but in my actual real-life usage I've found that it does. If you're learning, you're definitely better off learning the standard stroke order for the area where you live.

I mean, sure...there's a gray area here. I could theoretically write all of my latin characters from right-to-left, but it would be wonky and hard, if only because english is written from left to right.

I believe there's a reason for the rules and that you need to know them. I think patio11's metaphor is the correct one -- it's a lot like english spelling.

Of course it's prescriptive and there are regional differences. As you say, it's just like spelling. "Colour" still looks wrong to me. Just like a different stroke order looks wrong to a native reader. The point is the differences are visible to the reader, it's not just an arbitrary set of rules for writers. The reader can tell if you're following the rules or not.

I think you're right that there are certain characters where drawing it the "correct" way leads to a better result, and that there's a reason for the rules (i.e. that the rules are rationally derived). Using the correct order is also probably faster. I think the spelling metaphor is a good one.

I doubt your last claim in the general case, and I think the GP comment in particular is taking things too far -- there's no way that the average Japanese reader is going to be able to tell the stroke order used to write ぉ (in handwriting scenarios, not calligraphy), so long as you don't mess up the form of the thing.

It's their culture. There is no Chinese without People making it, and the people who made it say this is how it goes. There can't be a higher or lower analysis of the topic since it exists to be analyzed at all through their efforts to give it meaning.