Interesting conjecture! And I think that while your discussion (and inclusion of Goolsby) may certainly contain a healthy number of alpha-numeric characters, it is not really “too long” or OT, @FredGUnn.
I’ve always thought of standard “Western” musical notation as walking a tightrope, balancing between efficiency on the one side and clarity on the other.
Less visual information (like the OP’s dotted-half tied to an eighth) helps speed up the brain’s processing rate, but at a certain point the reduction in the number of symbols crosses over into obscuring the rhythm’s relationship to the meter/measure. (I, for one, do not believe that point is reached in this example, btw. How important is it, really, in that context to see beat 3…?)
Adding psychologists’ insights into the all-important factor of cognition and information processing is critical. After all, the rhythmic aspect of this kind of music notation abstracts considerably from being a “temporal ruler,” à la key/piano roll editors and other grids. We’re glad it does, of course, if for no other reasons than visual compression and paper savings, but it does mean we face some challenges in keeping things clear.
The gist that seems to be emerging (via “violent consensus” 
) in this and other related threads is that there are different perspectives on striking that balance, and we’d love it if Dorico offered them all! 
And I do think that acknowledging slight differences in common practice across different groups of reading musicians (genres, parts of the world, reading experience level, etc.) is worth keeping in mind. (For example, when I look at the way some of the highly syncopated rhythms of Afro-Latin musics are written, my own “always-show-the-half-bar-in-4/4,” etc., brain wiring can start to short-circuit.)