Alternatives To IPA Characters

I have heard complaints about problems with IPA, mainly for on-the-fly transcription, or how to actually produce the characters. In handwriting, several characters can be ambiguous {s} and {ʃ} can look very similar if not made obvious, {m/ʍ} and {r/ɾ} are other examples. There are solutions if you are careful, or make habit of writing characters a certain way. Generating {ɾ} with a serif along the bottom (like in r, but without the upper left hook) is quite common, to the point where a room of about 12-15 linguists looked at me with sideways tilted heads when I insisted that the character actually does not have a line at the bottom. Alternative symbols are quite common also, APA {š} is used for handwriting IPA {ʃ} to prevent confusion.

Sometimes I'll use a shorthand or nonstandard diacritics to redundantly decide characters, but not too often, since I'm usually not in too much of a hurry or likely to confuse what I'm writing. For quick work, I could see why it might be a problem. I just discovered this page on Wikipedia about non-standard characters, and many characters include so-called "secondary" features of articulation. Sinologists, Japanologists, and Koreanologists use a lot of these characters, and the common feature among them is that the symbols they use tend to be much simpler, and probably easier for notating a symbol that has phonemic quality. {ʮ} is supposed to be represented with {z̩ʷ} in IPA, which seems a bit tedious. If secondary articulation is a primary feature, why shouldn't it be represented in a single character? Already, most symbols already represent several qualities abstractly. {p} for example represents three features, a voiceless, bilabial, plosive, sound. If a language has a very productive phonemic distinction of aspiration, it seems useful to perhaps distinct symbols for it, especially if there are many other qualities that are commonly associated with phonemes.

I do feel that for reading purposes, and clarity of transcription, especially for a wider audience, say linguistics classes, or pronunciation guides in books/online, standard IPA is ideal, everybody can figure it out, and probably quicker than referencing all of the (non-)standard characters used by a specific group.

There aren't any languages I work with (that I can think of) where this would particularly help out, but some languages that have high amounts of aspirated, or ejective, or labialized consonants that are distinct phonemes, or they even don't have the "basic" form. If a language has the phonemes {kʲʰ/kʷʰ/kʼʲ/kʼʷ} and not {k}, what sense does it make to keep writing {k} over and over? If the crucial distinctions are aspirated versus ejective and labialized versus palatalized. Perhaps there could be symbols for aspirated and ejective, such as ʞ and ᴋ respectively, and then use the diacritics on them, or some other variation, to keep it visually simple and more representative of the phonemic aspects of the language.

I would like to think that anybody who had this problem has probably worked out there own solutions, but it might be nice to see endorsed versions of such consonants as "notational alternatives," even exclusively. There already plenty of (arguably) redundant diacritics, so I see no reason why a new paradigm could be set up for people to standardize their notes for passing around.