Minor point: simplified characters weren't intended to make Chinese easier to read (which is good, since they'd be a miserable failure at that). They were intended to make it easier to write (by hand!) -- the idea was to reduce the number of strokes used to write common characters, and the accompanying propaganda was to the effect that using simplified characters would cut a piece of typical text from so many strokes to so many (less) strokes. Characters were targeted for simplification not based on how ungainly they were but based on a combination of how many strokes they required with how frequently they were used.

Then the advent of computers and typing made stroke count mostly irrelevant.