Having spent quite a lot of time recently looking into this area of the Voynich botanical labels and having spent some time studying Voynich labels as a whole I would reiterate that if one looks at this question through the lens of someone familiar with diplomatic ciphers of the early 15th century then certain explanations present themselves. The key features of ciphers of that time was the use of nulls, homophones and a glossary. Now in general nulls correspond to nonsense/meaningless text. Likewise homophones correspond to the scope for identical words being spelled in completely different ways. A glossary could apply in the context of rare symbols corresponding to specific words. I described before elsewhere how a diplomatic cipher key could be modified in a minor way to use glyph strings as an example of this.
The idea of a preponderance of null words i.e. filler text is something I have also addressed elsewhere. I am not yet persuaded by the idea that all the text is meaningless, but I find the idea that there is a significant amount of filler text hard to avoid.
In the past when I have mentioned ciphers the response has tended to be that the Voynich doesn't fit exactly with standard ciphers of the time, something I agree with now and did then, therefore it is said that it cannot be a cipher. However it is perfectly possible that it is a cipher highly influenced by cipher techniques of the time, but with some differences.
The idea of a preponderance of null words i.e. filler text is something I have also addressed elsewhere. I am not yet persuaded by the idea that all the text is meaningless, but I find the idea that there is a significant amount of filler text hard to avoid.
In the past when I have mentioned ciphers the response has tended to be that the Voynich doesn't fit exactly with standard ciphers of the time, something I agree with now and did then, therefore it is said that it cannot be a cipher. However it is perfectly possible that it is a cipher highly influenced by cipher techniques of the time, but with some differences.