I think on balance Approval Voting would be an improvement, by removing the spoiler effect and allowing new parties to emerge (and old parties to split), but you're right that burdening voters with difficult strategic questions is not a decision that should be taken lightly.
Of course, FPTP has its own strategic problems, leading to people having choose whether to vote against their actual preference, but this is at least a familiar problem for people that have experienced this type of election before. I suppose that voters who are confused by Approval Voting could continue to treat their ballot as if it were a FPTP ballot, but this does feel like it is giving more voting power to people who are more intelligent (which some people here might undemocratically see as a positive) or more devious (which people might not see themselves as).
For me, though, the biggest issue with Approval Voting is that it makes the counting process harder, which risks entrenching the need for untrustworthy electronic voting machines. Approval Voting does at least satisfy the Summability criterion, but, if counting by hand, the ballots ideally need to be divided into 2^N separate piles (for N candidates), or there needs to be N separate running tallies of votes, as opposed to under FPTP where there only needs to be N piles, and the piles could even be weighed to count them.
I don't believe that it is an unreasonable requirement that an electoral reform proposal allows easy hand counting of ballots, as MMP can be just as easy to count as FPTP. (If a separate ballot paper is used to express party preference in addition to candidate preference, that effectively means 2N piles, but the Zweitmandat system allows the party preference to be inferred without needing the second ballot paper).
Of course, FPTP has its own strategic problems, leading to people having choose whether to vote against their actual preference, but this is at least a familiar problem for people that have experienced this type of election before. I suppose that voters who are confused by Approval Voting could continue to treat their ballot as if it were a FPTP ballot, but this does feel like it is giving more voting power to people who are more intelligent (which some people here might undemocratically see as a positive) or more devious (which people might not see themselves as).
For me, though, the biggest issue with Approval Voting is that it makes the counting process harder, which risks entrenching the need for untrustworthy electronic voting machines. Approval Voting does at least satisfy the Summability criterion, but, if counting by hand, the ballots ideally need to be divided into 2^N separate piles (for N candidates), or there needs to be N separate running tallies of votes, as opposed to under FPTP where there only needs to be N piles, and the piles could even be weighed to count them.
I don't believe that it is an unreasonable requirement that an electoral reform proposal allows easy hand counting of ballots, as MMP can be just as easy to count as FPTP. (If a separate ballot paper is used to express party preference in addition to candidate preference, that effectively means 2N piles, but the Zweitmandat system allows the party preference to be inferred without needing the second ballot paper).