copy of an older, barely legible manuscript?

[JoJo_Jost]

(There is also evidence that, sometime in the 600 years after the VMS was written,
large parts of the text and figure outlines were restored by carefully retracing them,
because they had faded to almost invisibility.  The scribe who did this restoration
did not know the alphabet, although he may have mostly inferred it as he worked.
But this is still a disputed theory.)

@ Stolfi: Thank you for your contribution! Do you have any links/sources for this?That would also fit in with my theory. Among other things, I have also been looking deeply into ligatures and brevigraphs. I will be creating a thread on this soon. I have found many interesting ligatures that define some words and letters of the VM differently.

But, and this is the important thing, here too you quickly notice that many small parts that are actually normal in ligatures and often fulfil an important function only appear extremely rarely. But they do appear. For example, a small superscript 9 at the end of the word for us. (I just can't remember where, if anyone has a text passage for this, thank you).

The problem: if they do appear, why so rarely - that is not normal?
Why would someone use these small characters so few times in the text when many of the other glyphs are ligatures? That doesn't make sense unless the text has actually faded, rendering these small circles, strokes and letters ‘invisible’. That would be a very good indication that a lot of important information is missing from the text.

Conclusion.
If one now imagines that information has been lost both through the copyists and additionally through faded writing, then this fits exactly with the picture I have:

The text is not yet decipherable, simply because too much information has disappeared... However, if one knows this, one might have a small chance...