I feel like Japanese strikes the right balance, no ugly oversimplified characters but making common kanji easier to write for children (國→国、櫻→桜）

For example 竜 is a fairly common simplification of 龍 and imo not nearly as ugly

Yeah except hiragana and especially katakana both look ugly though.

There are some strange-looking ones too (圖-図、圓-円), but agree that overall it was lighter touch. I think all simplification projects have an inherent awkwardness in taking handwriting shorthand or cursive and trying to reformalize it back to print. In any case it's a shame that there was no coordination due to obvious geopolitical conflicts, that we're now left with 3 sets. It was easier last time, 2.2k years ago when some dude took over all places that wrote Chinese characters and forced a single way of writing :)

Sure traditional looks nicer, but holy fuck is writing it (by hand) ever annoying. When I asked friends who grew up with the traditional characters about it they said a lot of people use some form of simplification when taking notes or leaving messages for friends/family. People from mainland seem to only shorten words by omitting characters of longer words, if at all.

And about losing the historical roots, I guess if you're interested in it, the characters will always be there and accessible for you to study. I'd be interested how much the average Joe from Taiwan really remembers about random characters' roots, composition and meaning. I know much more people from the mainland, and among them are people who don't give shit, and those who can also write a lot of traditional characters and give lectures about the origin of meaning of some character and whatnot.

Also, since this is about computers after all, I've seen a study a while ago about from mainland where they tested how many mistakes people make writing less common characters. There was a bar chart that went down between 10 and 20ish, then went up a bit and started to go down again at around 30. It was speculated that people in school still have to write a lot by hand, and during/after college that stops and everything has been digital for a decade now so people just forget again, but folks old enough to have used pen and paper for a couple decades just had enough practice. I wonder if this effect would be more or less pronounced with traditional characters.

> simplified just looks ugly

I prefer simplified for the aesthetics alone. Traditional is cringe and ugly in typed form.