Deconstruction of benched gallows

[ThomasCoon]

Perhaps, but certain things about the VMS like the low entropy suggest that there's not a lot of orthographic variation going on in general.  

That is true, there is low entropy. I believe that can be attributed to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In addition, benched gallows may have even contributed to low entropy if those statistics were calculated with an EVA transcription: [ckh, cth, cph, cfh] would be seen as predictable 3-letter combinations. But I'm not sure how entropy was calculated (maybe not with EVA), so I could definitely be wrong.

And I still think my point about the script apparently being designed with cKh in mind is a strong indicator that it's meaningful.

That is an interesting observation. I think on your side, one thing which may be hard to prove is that the author didn't stumble upon the cKh combination after he began using script  - there are many examples of signs ending up fitting together which were never intentionally designed to be (Mayan Hieroglyphs give many examples). I believe the VMS author designed the two signs separately and later realized he could fit them together if he elongated the ch a little.

Either way, both of us seem to be arguing from observation and conjecture, and this is problematic. Without stone-cold numbers to support or deny what we see, we will continue to go in circles forever and the VMS will never be solved ("I think that [a] and [o] are the same" - "I think that [l] is a form of [y]" - "I think that [ch] and [k] weren't intentionally designed to make [ckh]").

We need statistics

I still see the same problem - a similarity is cited as evidence of equivalence and a difference is cited as evidence of equivalence.  What would be evidence that they are not equivalent?

That is fair. I see what you are saying. I have an idea to solve this problem but I'll have to do some manuscript-wide distribution searches and get back later.