The "gallows" characters

[-Job-]

Yes, and certainly the embellishment is (and has been indeed, in the Voynich discussions) the natural assumption in the first place.

For a somewhat more comprehensive check of the "coverage" hypothesis, one may do the following (limiting this to plain p and f, for simplicity):

1. Locate all words containing plain p and f 
   
2. For each word, write down the order of the coverage (e.g. if the loop is covering one character, the order is 1, if it is covering two characters, the order is 2, and so on; if the gallows does not cover anything, the order is 0)
   
3. Check if the non-zero order of coverage is preserved for occurrences of a given word as identified in point 1 above. If it is, at least in some of the occurrences, then we observe a system. If it is not, then possibly these are flourishes, indeed.
   

The following image is a collage of all words starting with EVA 'p' or 'f', sorted alphabetically according to the respective EVA transcriptions:
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It was originally assembled for a different purpose but might help to compare features of the gallows characters. There is also one for 't' and 'k' here:
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I think your coverage hypothesis is interesting. It's also the type of feature that could increase the overall entropy of the text.

On the other hand, looking at the above images, i don't see really see a pattern.