From my recollection cued speech and signed English both are controversial in the Deaf community. They are seen as clunky and forced on them by the hearing community.

I think the biggest issue is that most languages including ASL have about the same informational density for a given unit of time. Whereas Cued Speech and Signed English have significantly lower informational density.

Isn't the purpose of cued speech not to replace ASL/other sign languages, but to add some support for a person who does not know ASL to speak clearly to a deaf person?

If you're a teacher or a police officer or someone who needs to talk to all people, including deaf people, wouldn't learning the eight cues be a useful tool, even if you're not going to fully-learn ASL?

Maybe, but I don't see the point. Speaking with your hands is weird no matter what you are doing. Learning ASL signs instead of something else is that much harder, and ASL is a lot richer than either.

Of course I can't claim any ability in ASL. When taking the baby sign language classes my teacher was very insistent that to the baby what sign you use doesn't matter, but we should use ASL signs because learning any other sign isn't any easier, and this way we have a few dozen signs that are actually useful after the baby grows up. Which is the point: if you learn some signs of ASL you can communicate better than pointing. When you learn something else your are just pointing and hoping you are understood.

If the signs are just small set of cues for the most common phrases a police officer needs to convey, then why not just teach this as an ASL subset?

Did you watch the video on Cued Speech? It's not a set of signs for common phrases at all. It's simply a small set of gestures that accompany some of the hard-to-lip-read sounds, like /m/ /p/ /b/.

So if you're saying "mat" "bat" or "pat" those all look the same to a lip-reader. With the cues, you have a small gesture that is distinct for /m/ /p/ /b/.

They combine together to make a total of about a dozen gestures that can be used to differentiate between any hard-to-understand English word.

So it's not a phrase book. It just allows you to say anything you want to say and be understood a little more clearly by a lip-reader.

Without knowing anything about deaf attitudes in general, I've learned to not mistake the loudest and angriest voices in a group as representative of all of it.

Sure, but if you're not deaf then the tradeoffs might be quite different

My wife and I learned under a Deaf school teacher (for a Deaf school) for a semester where she taught ASL and a little about Deaf culture. She was very sincere in her description that there is a lot of pride in Deaf culture. Now I have also heard the story of a hard-of-hearing woman who, having hearing parents, was greatly conflicted in going all in on ASL vs. learning Cued Speech. The Deaf community she was learning from spoke very intensely that she should not go that route and instead stick with ASL; partly I think because of this pride they feel in the culture and arts surrounding the language. There was shame and guilt in her story but she found a way to be connected to both the Deaf ASL community and the hearing community with Cued Speech.

I feel like the alphabet + literacy does a decent job at creating phonological awareness already.

The value proposition of CS is language accessibility to Deaf/HoH people while still using English.

ASL, which comes with its own body of literature, puns, jokes, culture, etc., wasn't designed in the sense that Cued Speech was, but offers something much more valuable, in my opinion.