[split] Jorge's Retracer Thread: darker ink, retracing of text and drawings

[Jorge_Stolfi]

glyphs that almost always stick together - like c and h, I think are usually in the same shade of ink?

Not true, there are many examples of the first e in one ink and the second in a different ink.  Sometimes the ligature is fainter than both...  You can see some in the following snippets:
                               
(There are also a couple of examples of imperfect retracing, and a case where a qo was mutated to qe.  And there is one example where a vellum defect did interfere with the writing.

I don't find "sheer insanity" to be a priory incompatible with the Voynich MS. I don't think we should expect the creators of this weird manuscript to be primarily governed by rationality. Especially by rationality as we see it now.

Still, if the Author was writing straight from brain to vellum, with a complicated encryption that requires leaving blanks spaces to be filled later, we would expect many corrections, with cross-outs, insert-heres, etc.