I agree that 新字体 is preferable to 简体字 for exactly the etymological reason you cite, the thing with 言 only being simplified when it is a radical in 簡體字 really irritates me (especially since it is not a difficult or slow radical to write anyhow), and there are more examples than just that. For me I practice with 正體字 most often despite being more familiar with Japanese; so my preference goes 新字體 > 正體字 > 簡體字.
P.S. adding lang attributes on those spans where you compare versions of the characters would be nice, though I get that you have to choose just one of several, when a character is nearly identical in two or more countries. In my browser it also fixes an issue where despite serif being in your CSS font stack, it will select a sans-serif/gothic font by default if no lang attribute is set.
Saying Simplified Chinese makes less sense in terms of etymology while only providing a handful of examples is cherry-picking, since over two thousands characters are simplified[0].
I can provide a few examples where characters are more "etymological" in Simplified version vs in Traditional: 國 vs 国，黨 vs 党
I don't see how 玉 has more etymological significance to 國 than 域/或. What analogy are you drawing on where the previous most common character for land/country is a worse etymological root than a character that apparently has meant only jade (or direct analogies to the material preciousness of jade) for longer than 國 has existed.
As for 黨, it is a direct analogy to 當 as in 當天. There is a little bit lost in the conversion of 田 to 黑 but at least they are related.
Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉? As far as I can tell the 王 glyph predates the invention of 玉, and the purpose of this new glyph was to distinguish 玉 from 王.
Also isn't a land within borders still a better analogy for a country than a king within walls? Walls bounding a king seems more like a palace.
Unfortunately, vocabulary in languages are defined, not derived.
Why isn't "business" a measure of how busy you are?
Why isn't "waterboarding" analogous to "snowboarding" and "sandboarding"?
(As an engineer I hate these peculiarities and I'm all for fixing them but the majority of the world tends to want to stick to the not-necessarily-logical definitions.)
Sure, I'm not saying everything has to make sense, but buddy here was claiming that 国 had cleaner etymology than 國, and to me it seems like one of these is indirect, and the other is very direct.
P.S. adding lang attributes on those spans where you compare versions of the characters would be nice, though I get that you have to choose just one of several, when a character is nearly identical in two or more countries. In my browser it also fixes an issue where despite serif being in your CSS font stack, it will select a sans-serif/gothic font by default if no lang attribute is set.