Searcher - thank you for your comment.
I do not create theories and I did publish the details and bibliographic sources and reasons for the conclusions I reached. I shared that information over almost a decade and it is certainly unfortunate that material was usurped and misused in a way that was counter-productive. I expect that many just imagined that my research conclusions were no more than the general sort of hypothesising and guesswork etc.
I absolutely agree that speculative narratives are not the way to provenance a manuscript or understand imagery. I rarely need to resort to them, and we place little value on them in my profession. Evidence-first conclusions may still be mistaken, of course, but the method and process is documented as the work progresses, and a great deal is demanded before the conclusions are drawn. A conclusion must accord with every aspect of the primary document's evidence: including demonstrable consonance with our present sciences of manuscript studies, iconographic analysis, and the relevant fields of history, including economic history and the history of cultural exchange (to name two). With all the reading which had to be done, I really had little time for speculation.
On the other hand there is a reason that a sort of 'assertive-speculative' style is used in discussing the Vms where it is not to be found elsewhere. The approach finds its first flowering in a paper written in 1921 by Wilfrid Voynich. Such was its effect that from that time onwards even trained scholars have abandoned their own discipline's formal standards. O'Neill's paper about the sunflower, for example, is an obvious and extra-woeful case in point.
In my opinion the 'Wilfrid-approach' is regrettable because by omitting reference to sources used to form the
initial 'notions', and then only mentioning items that appear to lend them credibility, the speaker or writer shifts all attention from the supposed object of study to the personality of the speaker.
In effect, the reader is no longer permitted to evaluate the material; they are only permitted to conform to and believe what they are told by a
personality . Proofs for the speaker's
initial premises are invariably absent, and to question those is invariably to risk socially-motivated responses. So to ask (for example) why Wilfrid imagined the content's composition was contemporary with the object's manufacture would not have met with any lucid and historically verifiable explanation, but one more along the lines of 'you will believe it because I say so - and I'm an important person '.
Each in their own way, people such as the Friedmans and Prof. Brumbaugh adopted the same 'Wilfrid style' - which wasn't so remarkable in those times as it appears against the backdrop of modern historical and manuscript studies. Much of what is imagined for this manuscript is either historically, technically, or culturally impossible - and demonstrably so. The disproof may not exist in Voynich-related writings, of course.
We've long needed a detailed critical commentary on that paper of 1921, including the continuing impact of various unfounded assertions and assumptions. Whether it will ever be permitted for a 'Voynichero' to write such a re-evaluation without being accused of lese majeste, I couldn't say .