Was the VM a failure?

[oshfdk]

It is a very common modern misconception that illustrations are used to clarify things.
Certainly, that is the case nowadays.

Especially in early herbals this was NOT the case. Minta Collins is very clear about this. Highly recommended reading.

Initially, this was done to beautify the book, or make it more interesting. The people making the drawings were not the physicians who actually knew what the plant looked like. They did not even realise what are the plant properties that help to identify them. 

This last point was included in one classical work, by Theophrastus. This was only intruduced in Europe in Padua around the time of the Voynich MS creation, but few people could read the Greek. Translations appeared later, and plant drawings that were good enough to recognise the plant started to appear in the 16th century in the times of Brunfels, Bock and Fuchs.

This is interesting. So, it shouldn't be a big surprise then that the plants in the Voynich MS are hard to identify? I'm not really into image analysis, in popular accounts about the Voynich MS "mysterious unknown plants" seem to be one of the first talking points. But in reality, this is not something out of the ordinary for a XV century MS?