What do other herbals actually talk about? Here's an example.

[rikforto]

After reading on the forum for a couple of years, I got the impression that the language folks think it is all to be done with numbers and statistics and that the meaning is not relevant.

Oh goodness, no. There is a real chance that a breakthrough will be statistical, but even then old-fashioned linguistic know-how is likely to be decisive in both designing the statistical tests and interpreting the results. 

To pick a particular hobby-horse of mine, a lot of people analyzing the text would benefit from reading comparative studies about alphabets. The expectation is not what in the 21st century we would call a "narrow transcription" because alphabets generally don't distinguish words based on their spoken form, but instead their conceptual forms, more like a "broad transcription". It's a subtle distinction, but it is a world of difference when doing alphabet design. And even if that expectation is contravened, either a bit or entirely, knowing the difference between a phone and a phoneme is vital to creating corpora and running tests on them to claim that Voynichese might encode one instead of the other. As a rule, careful humanities work often underwrites good datasets, and this is acutely true in linguistics!

Anyway, my example is a little O/T, but thank you @gerrydelasel, these kinds of transcriptions are useful for thinking about likely plaintexts, and translations are actually useful for answering what content a plaintext might have! This kind of work at scale is the raw fuel of quant work and it is appreciated