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It shows the amount of emotion a man develops, when he/she invested a lot of time in something and then is told by others, or he see's it, but wont let it in... How much a man is willing to sacrifice just to win. Maybe McEwans income, the writer of the claims above, was entirely dependent, but that would explain the utter neglect for rational thought, his reputation and ego was surely threatened, nothing else makes better fools of ourselves than a shattered image of ourselves we so carefully painted.
For the longest time I defined myself a martial artist doing Aikido amongst Aikidoka, Taijiquan amongst Taij practitioners, it seems I am very special in that regard, because Aikidoka are only Aikidoka when they do it, or they fall off the art in disgust after some time and hate the art, because it was all fake. Nowadays I do Mixed Martial Arts and I see so much useful stuff from Aikido, and I therefore use it, but I rigourously leave out the stuff, that just boosts the ego (all while claiming to be pretty spiritual). So I never left Aikido, I learned from it and went on and on and on. The journey of failing and correcting is so much fun, I would even consider that a spiritual path that teaches humbleness rather than gain or accumulation of "I am right, righter, ultraright".
That's who we are. A believe system made up to guide oneself in this world turns anything to "curious facts", when it suits them. Nowadays even leaders of once respected countries call everything not suiting "fake news". Well the sand of time will cover that empire soon, and new will rise, that will do no better...
In Evans time there were probably not legions of Gregg writers to prove him wrong, but enought to make him uncomfortable, and Gregg is in my eyes more of an Edison than a Joseph Swan (source: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/who-really-invented-the-light-bulb), meaning he knew to sell his stuff. So Gregg was in my eyes someone with a good eye for what was a good idea (like Malone's idea to use elipses and circles for vowels, for which someone else had the idea for, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but some acknoledge it)... Gregg was more as a businessman, who was making a living in the true american sense - claiming, attracting investment, advertising, playing the homegrown card and leaving out those who should be credited. Gregg was clever, his system requires dictionaries, and he provided. Teacher of other systems were no entrepreneurs, not as much driven and their system not as appealingly simple.
I for myself am not a protagonist of a style. I know how to optimize a fighting system for a shorter guy facing someone with more reach, or vice versa. How to prepare a striker vs. a grappler. You must have a clear mind and internal strategy, what you wanna gain if you want to gain the upperhand (or simply not die in a fight). Designing a Shorthand system is not as dramatic, but nevertheless a bit the same and it's simple to measure. If you succeed to write as fast as someone speaks or at least dedicated pupils of yours do (mostly it were daughters and sons proving fathers invented system) or you don't. There is plenty of evidence that there are effective systems for each of the two main approaches:
There is also plenty of evidence, that you can rely either upon very simple geometric (curves and straight) strokes or complex strokes, that in turn are made up of simple strokes, but gain its own 'optimized form', like s-t -> st or s-t-r -> str in a lot of germanic systems, n-t -> -ent,end in Gregg. German/cursive shorthands make a clear distinction, where a sign begins und where it ends, and connecting strokes are used to encode vowels, together with positioning, shading, stretching, accentuating, enlarging; thus they can use complex compound letters, that often resemble the primitive componants to extent, but slurred together, smoothened.
A lot of old texts can be deciphered, be it Tironian, Gurney, Mason, Taylor, Shelton, Pitman, Gabelsberger, Gregg or DEK. I have never heard someone complaining shading or positioning would prevent that, nor did I hear, that they could not find a Gregg dictionary to know what the abbreviation could mean. If we could not read Shelton we could not understand Isaac Newton as good as we do. If Newton was fine writing it, it is fine with me, why should I argue with him that todays systems are better then his? The proof is evident, he made science history with it, maybe he did not write verbatim, but sure it served him and mankind as a whole. Why fight over nothing?
As in mixed martial arts, there are some styles that are cleverly designed, but not unlike in MMA, some styles in shorthand are neglected right now, even though they provide immense wealth in technique and some have proven to work. (e.g. Karate was believed to be of no use at all, but now that some of the best have adopted the good and won with it, it looks different).
The in the anglophonic world unknown system Gabelsberger needs some time to wrap your head around, but it works and it's fun and even artistic to write in and it outperformed the competition at that time it was popular, ppl used it to write letters to their friends and did not care to write it again in normal script, because it was not only "shorthand" it was a full fletched replacement of normal writing! DEK is its descendent, popularized through the Nazis like Volkswagen, used today to record the discussions in the german senate verbatim and it is neither Pitman nor Gregg, but it sure does the job, right now, not in some fantasy land!
We have to aknowledge, that there are some systems that are overall more effective than others in the same domain of style, but there are at least 3 main domains, plain simple styles that simplify a word very much, before writing it, systems use a lot of techniques (i call them eclectic styles) and cursive styles, that try to emulate cursive connected normal writing, with a lot of complex signs, that go from top to bottom or in the other direction). One style certainly favors more the artistic side and another style more the mental side of a person. Some like to remember abbreviated words, some like to remember encoding rules, compound letters, special signs for Affixes and common words, some like to encode information via relative positioning, reading is easier first, because all can be encoded easely, but to be fast, you have to do same what the simple styles do, abbreviate, abbreviate. And you end up again with gibberish if you are not familiar and have no access to a dictionary.