Are shorthands really just phonetic systems?

Shorthands say that they are phonetic, but in fact we just like to leave the unnecessary out, and the rest we deem important we squish into a fixed set of literals. I call that transliteration, and this process is by no means a logic one, or let's say the chosen literals and the ease of writing them influences the transliteration rules. Speed dominates, and giving just enough hints, so possible ambiguities are reduced and not created.

For instance gregg shorthand transliterates word/sound "I" into 'a', when used as a pronoun, but midword you write 'ai'. The reason probably being, that 'a' has the big circle as shape: {O} and 'e' as well as 'i' have the small circle as shape: {o}. Combining them to 'ae' was slow and ambigous to 'ia', so he created a broken circle, that was faster, but still too slow for the very common pronoun.

"Cute" is written as 'keut' in gregg (yeah phoneticly!), but "coat" is written as 'kot' even though in IPA we write it either british [kəʊt] or with american accent [koʊt]. This is just an oddity of gregg resulting of the fact that 'eu' is written easely, because there is a circle in it, that cannot be anything else, but 'ou' would generate a wave form, which is not that easy to distinguish from the other letters that all have slight curves and bends.

As I mentioned earlier in the case of greggs small circle-sign, shorthand also likes to overload a shape (glyph): [e,ə,ι,i] (IPA letters) have the same glyph. The big circle can be [ɑ,æ,eɪ] and [aɪ] as pronoun.

Conclusion: Most shorthands are somewhat phonetic in resemblance, but first and foremost they bend the rules so the word heard (from the speaker) can be written as fast as possible. By the way, those shorthands that claim to orthographic are not either, when they want to record speech ad verbatim. The transliteration rules just stick a bit more to the rules of orthography.