Have we ruled out simple substitution unwisely?

[oshfdk]

If we've made an incorrect analysis somewhere, and that has become the bedrock of further discussion, it leads to people being politely dismissed straight away. We should make sure that our foundation is not made of sand.

I'm not sure there is a problem in the first place, I haven't seen occasions where simple substitution was dismissed without at least looking at the result it produced.

If a person enters with a reproducible simple substitution solution that all of a sudden leads to a meaningful and grammatical text in some attested language, I'm absolutely sure this won't be dismissed straight away. As far as I understand, the only thing that is dismissed straight away is AI slop, and I believe rightly so.

Also, some simple substitution solutions may be able to explain the entropy, etc. For example, Jorge Stolfi's Chinese theory appears to be based on phonetic transcription, which means all possible problems that simple substitution has would also apply, but it's argued that the entropy and the structure of the words are explained by the features of the underlying language.