[split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature of the underlying text

[ReneZ]

We don't know what are individual characters, and we don't know what are individual words.

Any serious progress in the meaning of the text has to look at both. The main advantage of the characters is that there are many, many more, so statistics are more stable. They are also easy to 'play with'.
It is possible to create substitutions whereby the unusual bigram statistics are completely normalised.

With respect to words, it is an open question to me, whether it is possible to create a Voynich dictionary, in which every Voynich MS word type can be matched to one word in a single language, such that the corresponding substitution leads to a mostly meaningful text. I rather think that this is not possible. (Please note: "I rather think").

If the answer to this question were indeed: "no", then the vast majority of proposed solutions fail, because they rely on this.
The so-called Chinese Hypothesis (which isn't a proposed solution yet) would also be a victim.