[pkolaczk]

It looks better on paper for an engineer, but not for someone who actually plays an instrument and reads the notation. With most western music, not all 12 pitches in an octave are used most of the time, but only a subset determined by the key and scale. Although the currently used notation may look weird for a newbie, it takes just a quick look at the key signature and you know which pitches will be used in a piece of music. When you know the scale (and practicing scales is just a standard part of learning), then "decoding" a note by counting tones is much easier than counting individual semitones (12 seems just too many). After a little practice you get it intuitively and you really don't count; you just know where each tone (or chord) is in a given scale and what function it has. And then when you suddenly see an additional flat or sharp symbol before a note, you know that this is an out-of-scale note, so it is also easier to play it. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer.