Is it healthy to try and solve the MS 408

[Mark Knowles]

In regular scientific problems that is never an issue.
You won't find unknowledgeable amateurs trying to solve any of the many unsolved mathematical problems.

That's exactly it. The VM sees deceptively accessible. But studying it seriously means becoming proficient in many serious fields of study, and that step is always skipped.
Issuing a prize might attract some qualified people. But the noise would increase to such a degree that the whole field would become unworkable.

Well, let's have a thought experiment. Supposing purely hypothetically there was a $1 Trillion prize for a decipherment of the Voynich manuscript. Your argument would seem to imply that the existence of such a prize would actually lead to it taking longer for a decipherment to be achieved than the absence of such a prize. Now, obviously nobody would ever offer such a large prize. However, I think such a prize would lead to significant financial and resource investment in deciphering the Voynich; there would probably be companies which would invest large resources in scanning archival material and searching archives for relevant documents. Yes, it would also generate a huge amount of noise. However given the investment of time and resources it would generate I think it would inevitably lead to a correct solution being arrived at more quickly.