So via Chris Fraser's blog on classical Chinese philosophy, I discovered Daoism autodidact Scott Barnwell's blog "Bao Pu" (抱樸), which is just amazing. And via that I discovered that Imre Galambos has put his entire 2006 book Orthography of Early Chinese Writing online.

I haven't finished R-ing TFB yet, but it's stimulating stuff so far: the basic hook is "the principle of looking at uninterpreted character forms [...] without assuming the existence of a correct form." In other words, by "examin[ing] pre-Qin writing on its own terms," Galambos hopes to shed new light on its actual nature, including the "specific patterns behind [its] variability," and thereby on the development of the Chinese writing system in general.