Have we ruled out simple substitution unwisely?

[eggyk]

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.

That's fair, although from my personal experience I feel as though people are not encouraged to persue such ideas here. I do often see messages that dismiss the possibility of a simple substitution as well due to entropy issues. I don't have a specific example to give you, so i might be wrong 

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.

This is a good example of what I mean, this wording presumes that the entropy is something that needs to be explained. In that sense, the beginning point of the discussion is that the entropy of the VMS has been measured correctly and is not normal. I do note that most people still attempt substitutions based on the existing alphabets though.