I think this is a question for the speakers of the language to talk
to us about; it's really a question of mutual intelligibility, isn't it?
In a manner of speaking, perhaps; but technically it is not because Chinese writing, in either of the two forms, is only partially phonetic, I believe the proper terminology has something to do more with "mutual literacy" or something like that.
So far as I know, there is no major movement afoot to split the two.
A few people support it, and one of the main ones, the only one who was actually working on the accidentally-created website, is a 15 year old American living in Arizona. I mention this not to say that a 15 year old American living in Arizona can't possibly be right about this, but rather to indicate what I understand *at the moment* to be the situation on the ground.
Just curious, Jimbo, but how is my *age* any more relevant to /this particular issue/ than the number of pets I have or my favourite colours?
-Jin Junshu/Mark