Can we go further?

[eggyk]

What I have been finding lately in the studies I have carried out and posted here is that the results at the level of text structure, entropy, etc., all end up reaching and reaffirming conclusions that “human” experts had already arrived at years or even decades ago. It does not seem that we can squeeze much more information out of the Voynich text, assuming it is a text at all.

I believe that we are still observing and learning new things about the text. Those observations lead to further exploration, and potentially extra information somewhere. Thus far, the conclusions all fundamentally point to "we don't understand the text". 

This is somewhat tangential, but a while ago I was involved in something called "crack the clue", which was an in-game riddle/clue solving event in the game "old school runescape". The developer in charge of the event set up a "treasure hunt" with many steps, with each step containing an almost impossible riddle or clue or lead, with multiple clues relying on eachother too. We're talking about ciphers, steganography, the works. Solving these clues was worked on by a community very similar to this one, with different professions, ideas (also crackpot ideas and conspiracy ideas like here) all desperately hoping to solve a step.

At a certain point, the whole community was stuck. Noone could solve anything for months. Some people resigned themselves to failure, others to a belief that it was a prank, or that there was nothing else to solve. Some people found slight hints of progress, only for it to be a red herring or meaningless. Some kept tirelessly working on a solution. The overall mood was almost identical to how it is here now, with posts almost identical to this post being common.

Eventually, the community had taken so long that the developer decided to give a very vague hint for what was needed (a location in the game, nothing more). Within a day, somebody worked out that there was a hidden morse code message in the midi sound file for that in-game location, which had to be connected with multiple other clues to produce a message. If someone had suggested it as a solution, it would have been called a crackpot theory. 

The community collecively realised that the solution somewhat made sense with the information we had, and could've been solved, technically. Many people had already gone to the location for leads but never for long enough to think of such a solution. The community may have never solved it, but a very vague lead very quickly led to a solution for a seemingly impossible problem.

The same could well happen in the VMS community. Who knows what we will find in the coming time? The rosetta stone manuscript of voynichese may be digitised and uploaded tommorow, for all we know (or some obscure info or marginalia was already digitised, but we haven't found it). Perhaps a different name, or mark, or something else vague will lead us to new evidence that explains a critical aspect of the VMS and its text.

An example of this would have been the carbon dating and MSI scans of the VMS. As far as I can tell, the entire framework of VMS solution hunting (including text analysis) changed significantly after both.