Hummingbird is fatally flawed for anything beyond beginner level stuff. It's not going to deal well with any sort of complicated rhythm. I'd love to see you accurately notate something at all complex, like say this, a snippet from a Beethoven piano sonata:
While it might have some minimal value for beginners, you might as well teach them real notation.
Let me present a metaphore.
You're in charge of the foreign language curricula in, say, Japan. You can offer either Esperanto or English but not both. Esperanto is easier to learn, but English is infinitely more useful.
The example picture you provide is a great example of how horribly, horribly flawed the current notation is for annotating rhythm.
I mean, many people have gotten used to that language, but there obviously can be a far simpler way to represent the same timing information than the first line of that pic.
And the example you give is not THAT complex - try to represent any interesting polyrhythm drum pattern in traditional notation, now that will be an excercise in futility.
The hummingbird is not a good enough solution - it's a step in the right direction and another step sideways; but we need to go much further to improve both ease of reading and ease of learning music.
To use a programming analogy, the current music notation is like if everybody had to learn programming through COBOL - it works, it's usable and widely used... but still, using a better, cleaner language for the same concepts would obviously bring benefits to all new users; even if it's of no benefit to all the current experts who already know the current notation by heart.
I think you misread me. I clearly said Hummingbird was not better enough to triumph. I was taking apart the idea that standard notation is so awesome that it can't imaginably be improved on.
Standard notation, QWERTY, English, Facebook, etc. are all flawed in many ways but to replace them you can't just be 1% or 5% better; you need to be an order of magnitude better. No one cares about learning Dvorak for 5 more WPM but if people could double their WPM the world would switch.
http://www.conknet.com/~proscore/samples/lgcplxpiano.gif
While it might have some minimal value for beginners, you might as well teach them real notation.
Let me present a metaphore.
You're in charge of the foreign language curricula in, say, Japan. You can offer either Esperanto or English but not both. Esperanto is easier to learn, but English is infinitely more useful.