[abhorrence]

And even if they did, the stems of the notes (excluding half and whole notes) traditionally are as long as the distance between octaves. One of the things that I think makes traditional notation more robust for experts is the redundancy of information.

It also helps that for many instruments there’s a mapping between the layout of the instrument and the notation! This is less true for brass and the violin family, though I think even with them there are probably some arguments to be made about the harmonic series, or the spacing of strings in fifths.