[T-R]

That's a fair point - seems related to the fact that people aren't writing as much anymore.

Anecdotally, I feel like Japanese picks a better point in the tradeoff space than other languages - Chinese characters are used where they get some leverage, with phonetics for everything else, even with a bunch of half-kanji words. Still, I'd imagine some of the less-commonly used ones will get dropped over time.

On the other hand, English+Emoji+Txt simplification seems to be approaching the same point from the other direction.