I was reading through waiting for someone to say that. Morse is intelligible with significant background noise, has a tiny bandwidth, requires very low power and is pretty popular. However it is not that easy to learn....I certainly failed!

If it is that good surely a simple program could be used to generate Morse from ordinary text and text from Morse or is there some non-technical reason why Morse code has to be generated by hand?

Most Morse is not generated by hand. The human ear tends to be much better at decoding it under sub-optimal conditions though.

Linked this above...but relevant here.

https://preppcomm.com/