'As an aside, I don't think I agree with the sentiment of "because it's hard we shouldn't even try".'

I prefer to phrase it as "If thousands of smart people before you have tried something, you need to know why they failed and have some reasonable reason to believe that your approach is better, or you will just be wasting your time."

I use this most often in the context of someone popping up and declaring that they wish to create a "totally visual" language. I don't want to stop that one-in-a-million guy who might make it work, but just blithely letting someone waste their time isn't very nice either. (That's where the whole "encouragement at all costs" ideology falls down; encouragement is not free and the costs are paid by the encouragee, not the encourager; think before you encourage somebody.) Usually I just see someone spout the same ideas that have been tried tens or hundreds of times before; the excited person should take the time to examine those efforts before continuing on, because the easy stuff has been tried and quite a bit of the hard stuff has been too. This goes for many things.