Musical notation is fine. But you have to go out of your way to encounter it. By comparison, written text is literally everywhere. I walked past a couple of pages of accumulated text just by walking to work and did not see a single musical symbol anywhere.
Musical notation is absolutely terrible, possibly even as terrible as written english, just in different ways.
Not only you cannot infer anything from context while reading for the first time (unlike with english), modal markings that completely change meaning of most symbols are scattere all over — slightly to the left, slightly above, left margin, top of the page etc
Like a lot of things in life, it's fine. Not good. We could do a lot better, but only with considerable human effort, for which there is not a strong incentive.
