Is there any really good reason not to mix two scripts, which are according to many people actually variants of one script but which are (if your proposal is accepted) seperately encoded for the convenience of some scholars?
Yes. The default template is for default behaviour. Most people in the world use a tiny subset of characters available, and don't care much about what happens in scripts which are not their own. This sort of battle was fought over Runic: Runologists wanted the Runes to be sorted in Latin alphabetical order, but this didn't make sense to the other clients of the script. The Latin ordering is considered to be a special tailoring.
This sounds to me like the kind of rule which is made to be broken. If all the 22 CSWA scripts are collated together by default, this would significantly reduce the objections to encoding them as separate scripts.
I would have just as many objections to doing that as I would with unifying it with Hebrew. Users don't expect this kind of interfiling when looking things up in ordered lists. Interfiling of scripts impedes legibility.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
