> I think in many cases they make that sort of deep understanding (how a
> character came to have its meaning) much more difficult, if not
> impossible.

Let's put that in perspective. Do you understand the etymology of every
word in English? Does anyone? No. Unless you look it up in some
dictionary about the subject. The same is for Chinese. While, Chinese
might get a general sense of the meaning by looking at the character,
we don't really worry about that. All we care about is how to correctly
write it, and what it means. So we don't have to know the etymology of
a character to know the meaning. As long as you already know what it
means. Know what I mean?

And one thing is interesting. People in Mainland China can generally
read Traditional Chinese, but not write it. But for people who read
Traditional Chinese, very hard to understand Simplified Chinese - just
can't recognize a lot of those characters, unless you spend some time
learning them.

Then, classical Chinese is much different from modern Chinese; much
like old English is different from modern English. So a lot of things
written in old times are too hard to read by most ordinary Chinese.
For example, 敬其事而后其食, this sentence is pretty simple, but
many people still can't understand it.