Subsitution key on f1r

[oshfdk]

But it would be very disappointing   and still leave the question as to why the original author would leave this arbitrary list of symbols

Why would this be disappointing? There are quite a few glyph sequences in the manuscript, which seem to be in the same hand as the main writing on the corresponding pages. We don't know why they were made, but we do know that this happened.

The EVA comparison is very interesting, too. But wuldn't the be a strange way to go about it for the same reasons? If the goal was a basis for easier transliteration (and maybe copying) of the manuscript, wouldn't you want to assign a letter to all symbols? 

I'm pretty much certain the middle column was already there. Given that it's made of non-repeating symbols, and includes some very common glyphs too, it would be easy to assume that it lists the alphabet of the manuscript. So, Marci, or whoever it was, decided to give legible names to symbols in this list.

As it stands, it doesn't even cover the first page.

We don't really know that and I think Marci was smart enough to realize that he couldn't know that either. Maybe this list does cover the first page. Consider this: glyph 'a' doesn't look like 'A' and 'b' is only somewhat similar to 'B', yet we know these are the same letters. If two glyphs look almost nothing like one another, they still could mean the same thing. When you are asked to list the alphabet, you will likely go abcde... or ABCDE... and not AaBbCcDd. So even though there are glyphs in the text that don't look like anything in the second column and there are glyphs in the second column that don't look like anything in the text, this doesn't automatically mean the column is not just the full list of letters used in the text.

 Furthermore, what would be the point of the 3rd column in that case?

Looks like Marci didn't know whether to include the top red weirdo glyph in the list? The first column doesn't include it, the third does.

Again, my thinking was that if Marci had an idea what one spcific word or maybe sentence of the manuscript might mean, he may have tried to derive the substituion alphabet from it. 

I find this extremely unlikely. If it was Marci who created the list of Voynichese symbols, why are there many symbols that don't appear in the text? If it wasn't Marci, why does the "substitution" map just go alphabetically?