The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I'm not sure what exemplars you're looking at, but in the ones I see it definitely looks like 撇 (the down left stroke) crosses 横 (the horizontal one) to me.

Indeed, even in Clerical Script there is always a "head" protruding above the horizontal line.  But it can be quite short, about as long as one stroke-width.  

If those are indeed Chinese characters, note that they were copied by an Author who almost certainly never studied Chinese writing (so much so that he got them upside-down) and then re-copied by a Scribe who had never seen Chinese writing before.  Thus it would be understandable if he omitted the "head".  

The middle horizontal stroke of capital letters A, E, H often crosses the legs and sticks out on the sides; but a copyist would not consider those protrusions significant, and would not feel obliged to reproduce them. 

No dictionary I've checked wants to go to bat for three strokes in the order implied by what's in the VMS,

What do you mean?  My dictionary says 大 is three strokes, and that is how I have learned to draw it:
   
The VMS symbol, whatever it is, is supposed to be three brush strokes too. (Although the outline of this brushed symbol was drawn by the Scribe with a sharp quill, in brown ink, and then he or someone else filled that outline with rusty-red paint.)

All the best, --stolfi