I came back to say I've thought about your argument a couple more times and I think you're on to something there. The idea that long variable names, even when they add to readability, are a secondary indicator of code badness (because the code is too complex not to be able to get away with short names) is a subtle and interesting way to frame the problem. I'm surprised it didn't get more pushback from the 95+% of programmers who take the opposing view. I suppose this little corner of the thread is a quiet enough backwater that nobody noticed.

But I still don't see how you get around the objection that, according to your preferred metric, if you replace all the names with arbitrarily small character sequences, you get significantly smaller code - yet clearly not better code.