The kanji for "what", and birds' tails

If you were drawing a square, how many strokes would you use and in what order? You might be thinking: I don't know: does it matter? If you're writing the square inside the kanji character for the word "what" (何), then it does matter. When it's time to draw just that square, you have to draw the leftmost side of it top-to-bottom. Then a single stroke covering another two sides: the top side left-to-right and the right side top-to-bottom. Then the bottom side, left-to-right. And that's just the radical in the center; there's other framing stuff around it. You have to start the whole character in the correct place, write three framing strokes, then do the square in the center, then go back and do the last framing stroke. The correct number of strokes, in the correct stroke-sequence, drawn in the correct directions. It's similar for all kanji, and there are 五万 (50,000) of them, although only 二千 (2,000) are in common use. I LOVE that! The fact that those things matter, for some reason, really appeals to me.

Some might say it's being anally-retentive. I don't. It seems to me to come from a love of beauty, and correctness, and excellence. And isn't that also what we love in software?

But it also makes me think of a theory about the tails of birds of paradise and peacocks. The theory says that these features evolved precisely because they are handicaps; that the male is attractive to females because he has survived in spite of his tail. As if, of two runners finishing a race at the same time, one is also carrying a heavy load and so he therefore must have a deeper, almost hidden, potential. Is something similar going on with kanji? What does the mastery of what appears to be an unnecessarily burdensome writing system imply? What does it say about the mind and the character of the individual willing and able to achieve it?

But even if this burdensome-for-the-sake-of-it aspect of kanji exists outside of my imagination, it's not what most attracts me to it as a mate. It's more about its ethics, morals, honor, even pride (because even our greatest strengths are rooted in human frailty). It's a search for the ideal.