I have only ever had two main points in this whole thread:

1. Simplified characters and traditional characters share a many-to-many relationship, not a one-to-many one

2. It is trivial (in reading) to go from simplified characters to traditional characters or vice versa. There is no significant difficulty difference in either direction.

My talk about the PRC speakers is not "to defend PRC speakers." It is simply some evidence of the latter. You have an entire country of people who can read traditional characters without any formal training in them (even when presented with single characters isolated from surrounding context). This is fairly strong circumstantial evidence that the barrier between the two is fairly trivial.

> I stand by my opinion that it's easier to switch from traditional to simplified than the other way round. This isn't really controversial, it's well-established in literature

Do you have examples from the literature of this? I don't know of any and I've watched this space (not particularly carefully so I may missed things, but I've read a fair number of papers). I know of results demonstrating the difference between how native simplified readers and native traditional readers break down characters (holistically vs analytically), but know of no other results. Even arguing from first principles is difficult. Even given a one-to-many relationship, that makes writing easier (mindless substitution works) and reading harder (again mindless substitution works now in the opposite direction). It's not obviously clear which direction works.

> to claim otherwise is tantamount to stating that there wasn't really any simplification.

This is not true. The vast vast majority of the simplifications are in simplifying character stroke counts, not in merging characters in any direction.

> It was designed to make it relatively easy for everyone to switch from traditional but not necessarily to go the other way.

This is also not true. This has never been a stated goal of any of the various attempts of simplification (《減省漢字筆畫的提議》, 《第一批簡體字表》, 《漢字簡化方案草案》, or the 《简化字总表》). More than anything its stated audience (when mentioned) has been illiterate speakers who are unfamiliar with any character set. The only reason that most of the characters look familiar is that one of their principles was to as much as possible not introduce new characters and only codify existing characters or character components (so simplified characters ended up relying a lot on variant characters and cursive script) since the point was to remove characters rather than add them. It's important to note this is the same goal the ROC had when creating their set of 教育部標準字體, what is usually taken as the body of "traditional characters" today. The main difference is that the ROC chose to use the most popular characters while the PRC chose to use the simplest characters. This was mainly chosen to avoid the thorny methodological issue of how to create characters wholly from scratch (which is what the now-discarded second round of simplifications did) not for ease of switching itself among the literate class, since the majority of people learning the character sets would be learning how to read for the first time.

To take a step back, I think you've been quite uncharitable to me in this discussion thread and keep implying motives I do not have.

And I understand you think I've been quite uncharitable to you. As far as I can tell you think that I'm essentially trying to show off some smarts here. That I happen to both derive pleasure from pedantically nitpicking where you're wrong and clearly ignoring the overall thrust of your point. I imagine your internal dialogue to something like the following:

"Come on, simplified characters and traditional characters basically share a one-to-many relationship. Everyone knows this. And now you latch on to some throwaway sentence I've written about whether people would recognize and turn this into some weird impassioned defense of "PRC speakers" which I never was even talking about in the first place! Clearly you're just trying to pick a fight here."

But I urge you also to view things from my perspective. I mean clearly I think you're misunderstanding me (why wouldn't I of course!).

My internal monologue goes something like:

"Look I was just making some corrections to some oft-repeated inaccuracies, now this person's accusing me of pedantry, okay now I've presented non-pedantic examples, now they think I'm defending 'PRC speakers' and somehow this is now a discussion about whether simplified characters have failed at their stated goals? Why do they keep ignoring the main points I'm making and mixing up my examples for my main points?"

From my perspective I've been frustrated in that essentially every comment I've responded to has consisted of you just ignoring my main points, blowing up some side comments I've made completely out of proportion and chalking up my very real counterexamples as "pedantry."

However, I also think it is very easy to go down this rabbit hole and dig our heels deeper, so I want to offer an olive branch and just cut to the heart of our disagreement.

I think we're both saying things that are stronger than what we intend and reading into each other's responses things that are not there. You think that traditional characters are the way to go and provide a smoother transition to simplified. I don't think so. I think traditional or simplified characters are both equally effective as a starting point and you can trivially transition from one to the other (I partially speak of this from personal experience as well when I took up reading and writing Classical Chinese.). You say this is a well-known result in the literature. I earnestly look forward to any examples you might have in the literature.

As for the original thing that sparked all this, the relationship between simplified and traditional characters and whether it's a one-to-many relationship or a many-to-many relationship. I want to emphasize it is certainly true that there are more one-to-many simplified-to-traditional examples than the opposite direction. However, the opposite direction is still a fairly significant minority. The proportion breaks down to something like 75%-25%. It's a large majority, but not an overwhelming one, and not a small enough proportion that I would call it pedantic.