Is the VM an autograph or copy?

[geoffreycaveney]

What is quite possible is that the content should only be accessible to an "exclusive" group of readers. That is, anyone without the necessary prior knowledge of the writing system should be excluded from the outset. So it was not about the distribution of information / knowledge to everyone who could read but about the transmission from insiders to insiders. The complete absence of any plain text (annotations, marginal notes and so on) reinforces this assumption.

This is a good possibility, again if we think the effort needed to produce the VMS and the ideas that were put in it. To ideate and design such a writing system that VMS has, cryptography+steganography (IMO), would also lead to think that the intended audience was intentionally small. Did they do it by themselves? Hiring external people to do would have exposed their system which they evidently didn't want to happen.

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I now imagine some guy with a vision who hired the cheapest bunch of scribes and painters in all the land.

While still keeping the system and content a secret?

Keep in mind that the time period was feudal, medieval Europe. Late medieval yes, but still a feudal society. It would not have worked the way we imagine it today with a wealthy capitalist hiring a group of wage workers. It would have been a feudal lord with a noble title who had a large retinue, like a small army of servants who pledged their loyalty only and exclusively to him and his family, their liege lords if you will. Sure, the system was beginning to fray at the seams after the Black Death, but the feudal social order still existed in the 15th century. 

The point is, the lord would have taken it for granted that his secrets could be entrusted to the servants and subordinates in his retinue. It would be unthinkable to even imagine that his or his family's secrets were not safe with them. Now I grant you that if the secrets expressed thoughts as extreme as something like "the Duke wants to kill the King", a certain level of discretion may have been observed, and the illustrators for example may not have been in on that part of the secret. But still, when the Duke or whoever was ranting and raving about his grievances against the King within the walls of his castle, at least some of his servants still would have heard him and known about such things. Their primary feudal loyalty was still pledged to the Duke, if he was their lord, and it would have been taken for granted by all that they would never betray such secrets.

Again, I acknowledge that this old feudal social order was beginning to fall apart by the 15th century, and by the 16th century it was replaced with a new social order. But those would have been the social expectations that everyone had and that everyone was expected to maintain and live up to. 

So to get to the point, I expect that in this scenario, the few trusted scribes and clerks who were given the task of performing the actual physical writing of the text of the secret cipher manuscript in the secret script would have been entrusted with the secrets. Perhaps different sets of secrets for the "Hand 1" scribe writing in "Language A", the "Hand 2" scribe writing in "Language B", etc.