quoting Morrígan:

Ultimately, this SCA is part of another system for hypothesis testing proposed reconstructions and sets of rules deriving child forms from them. The fact that it's usable by humans too is an added bonus. IMO, the most important contribution is that it can be used with a feature model, and understands (by default, though you can turn it off) that pʰ is different from p, and that a rule affecting the latter will not affect the former.

I think the issue is more that if you have situations XYZ where pʰ > p, it's fiendishly hard to get the rules to not treat the subsequent p along with original p, if that's what you want to do.

quoting Kereb:

quoting Radius:

Anyone who has much end-user experience with SCAs can tell you that the process of debugging your SC list so the program finally comprehends exactly what you want it to do, a painful and tedious process not given full justice by your phrasing "knows how to use them", is often more work than just sound-changing all your words by hand.

Yeah, I haven't found an SCA yet that wasn't more trouble to learn, and to trick into doing what I need, than just applying the sound changes myself. But then again I don't actually value having a fully sound-changed lexicon done for me automatically since I don't feel any entry should BE in the lexicon that hasn't been manually vetted anyway.

It is entirely about saving time. I adore personally vetting each change, but above a certain lexicon size errors (both in the changes themselves and plain old making sure all the words get changed) start to increase noticeably.