Objectively, “neurotypical” users will be helped by an error correcting code which permits software to point out to them where they are likely to have made a mistake.  That alone makes worthwhile a switch away from addresses checksummed with truncated-double-SHA256, in my opinion.  Also, I can personally attest that a “neurotypical” user has serious difficulties with mixed-case pseudorandom strings.  That’s the sort of design which leaves me cursing at things made more for the convenience of computers, than for the safety and sanity of humans—cursing whilst I back up and try the damn thing again, in some use cases on try 3/3.

I have some pie-in-the-sky, 1/65536th-baked ideas about crossing identity-based encryption with privacy-preserving payment codes and (waves hands) to neuter the central authority.  Someday....  I think everybody serious in this space has dreams of “squaring the triangle”; at least it’s more stylish than trying to build perpetual motion machines or recursive compressors.

As for what you said about developers being “likely to prioritize having things fit neatly into binaries”—yes, I get it.  I hope you caught my self-directed sarcasm about ASCII offsets in a base32 alphabet.  Well, I think I can squeeze in a lookup table.  No, better yet:  I’ll grab sipa’s code, review it, and call it a day.  That way, the wetware gets its confusables carefully arranged for maximal error detection.  But for revenge, I shall still get my jollies by changing case with bit-twiddling 0x20, etc. instead of calling the appropriate C library functions.  Hah!  The warm, squishy anthropoid lusers will never even know what I just did there.

Bech32 is a huge UX improvement.  Most of BIP 173’s implicit motives and explicit rationales cater to human needs.  I have no doubt that Bech32 will make Bitcoin addresses easier (or at least, less painful) for the overwhelming majority of “neurotypical” users—especially for the legions of future newbies who have not been biased through being emotionally accustomed to old-style addresses.  As such, I don’t get your comment about altcoins.  Bitcoin leads the way here, again.