…It’s not arbitrary at all. Sure, subshells fill up in the order of n + l. But for instance something as basic as the size of atoms which depends on the total number of shells…in the normal periodic table it increases down and decreases to the right, which this then abandons. The electronegativity of atoms depends on the total number of shells and how full the outer one is.
You’re saying to optimize for reading one thing by ignoring others, but again, there are good reasons the traditional form has been used by physicists and chemists and so on. They’re smart people; if it were easy to have an unambiguously better standard, they would.
