Was the VM a failure?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Many theories about the Voynich Manuscript portray it to be an ingeniously clever cipher or a novel method to encode a foreign or constructed language, often claimed to be invented by a famous person. Indeed all (serious) attempts to make sense of the text have utterly failed so far. [...] Regardless of the intention behind the VM, what we can say for sure is that it's creation process wasn't a success story that was frequently repeated.

First, I highly recommend two works by SF author Stanisław Lem which are highly relevant to our subject:  the book His Master's Voice, and a short tale in the book A Perfect Vacuum (IIRC), about the guy who chose as his life's quest to find a Genius of the First Class.

The mechanism by which the VM text was created did not gain traction and become widely used around the time the VM was made in the 15th century.

If the VMS is indeed encrypted.  That would not be strange, since there must have been thousands of "ingenous" encrypted schemes that ended just like that.

It is easy to create a devilishly complicated encryption scheme that is impossible to crack. Even Raphael Mnishowski, the originator of the "VMS is Bacon" theory, claimed to have created one. What is not easy is to create one that is practical -- fast to encode and decode, concise, with graceful response to errors, etc.

There are examples of encrypted works, using original methods, that resisted attempts to decode for centuries, and were cracked only recently.  IIRC, one was called Agripa's Second Book or something.  And then there is the Book of Soyga that drove John Dee nuts...

All the best, --jorge