[phkahler]

I'm not sure it's possible to say it's worse. You suffer from having learned the traditional notation, so some of this is going to look weird regardless. I'm not good at reading music and agree with some of the issues it has, but looking at this does seem like a different set of issues to me as well. I think the only fair comparison could be done by someone with a lot of experience using both.

I think it's fair to say the staff has to be spread out more for this notation since is doesn't compress 12 notes into 7 places like traditional notation.

OTOH be glad you're not reading guitar tablature ;-)

[chrismorgan]

Certainly I’m biased, but on the vertical alignment thing I think I can be objective: relying on sub-millimetre positioning is a bad idea.

[vintermann]

It certainly is, but there are similar obvious bad ideas in regular notation.

If you've typeset music manually, or written out nice parts by hand, you know that you need to take stem direction into account when spacing note heads. Notes with opposite stem direction will seem closer, or further apart, than they actually are. Optical illusions aren't a great feature of a notation system.

Five lines is also a bad optical choice, because it's actually very difficult to count 5 or higher parallel lines at a glance. I remember my piano teacher, who was a very strong sight reader, played a Bach fugue for me. However, the score had been annotated with a line showing the figure part ("dux", "comes" etc.) and as it happened that line was spaced exactly like a staff line. He'd played three measures before going, "wait, that doesn't sound right" and realizing he'd been playing on a six-line staff!