A big reason is of course the possibility of using arbitrarily complex letters or symbols, thus allowing Kanji (and Hanzi) to be used.
I'm reading a book right now on the difficulty that Hanzi brought to the developing china of the early 20th century [1]. The difficulties are all mostly predictable - cultural attachment, the fragmentation of languages and dialects, transliteration of tonal variants, finding a large enough keyboard etc.
But there are some interesting things I didn't know, for example that there were attempts to decompose symbols into radicals that could be combined.
I'm reading a book right now on the difficulty that Hanzi brought to the developing china of the early 20th century [1]. The difficulties are all mostly predictable - cultural attachment, the fragmentation of languages and dialects, transliteration of tonal variants, finding a large enough keyboard etc.
But there are some interesting things I didn't know, for example that there were attempts to decompose symbols into radicals that could be combined.
[1] Jing Tsu: Kingdom of Characters.