Is the Voynich illegible?

[Mark Knowles]

I actually think that the quality of transcription is not very important for VMS research. 

This is surprisingly often true. Since the VM text is so large, you can get away with a pretty large amount of errors. Or put differently, while there are many differences between transcriptions, the impact on statistics is often much smaller than one would intuitively think. 

What you say makes sense given the law of large numbers, errors are evened out. However that is the case if the errors are not often in a particular consistent direction, which they may be.

Now on the other hand it's surely annoying if one's favorite label happens to be unclear.

Yes, this is certainly particularly a concern of mine. If one is interested in very specific pieces text this can become a problem.