It certainly is, but there are similar obvious bad ideas in regular notation.
If you've typeset music manually, or written out nice parts by hand, you know that you need to take stem direction into account when spacing note heads. Notes with opposite stem direction will seem closer, or further apart, than they actually are. Optical illusions aren't a great feature of a notation system.
Five lines is also a bad optical choice, because it's actually very difficult to count 5 or higher parallel lines at a glance. I remember my piano teacher, who was a very strong sight reader, played a Bach fugue for me. However, the score had been annotated with a line showing the figure part ("dux", "comes" etc.) and as it happened that line was spaced exactly like a staff line. He'd played three measures before going, "wait, that doesn't sound right" and realizing he'd been playing on a six-line staff!
If you've typeset music manually, or written out nice parts by hand, you know that you need to take stem direction into account when spacing note heads. Notes with opposite stem direction will seem closer, or further apart, than they actually are. Optical illusions aren't a great feature of a notation system.
Five lines is also a bad optical choice, because it's actually very difficult to count 5 or higher parallel lines at a glance. I remember my piano teacher, who was a very strong sight reader, played a Bach fugue for me. However, the score had been annotated with a line showing the figure part ("dux", "comes" etc.) and as it happened that line was spaced exactly like a staff line. He'd played three measures before going, "wait, that doesn't sound right" and realizing he'd been playing on a six-line staff!