Chinese characters (and similar writing systems) do have certain advantages versus alphabetic systems though. The smallest unit of writing has more information embedded in it. You've got a decent chance of guessing the meaning of a compound word if you know some of the characters in it, though not necessarily the pronunciation. With alphabets, it's reversed, if you know all of the pieces of a word, pronunciation is usually simple, but meaning not necessarily so (especially in English). As a result, the written language is more dense, and can actually be read more quickly.
Finally, with an appropriate method, it doesn't have to take years to learn enough characters to write and read literately, I can read Japanese at a high school level, and I've been at it for a year and a half.
So, Japanese is a uniquely bad example here, right?
As I understand it, there are three alphabets: kanji (lots of Chinese characters), katakana, and hiragana. The latter two are used to spell out the syllables of words, in some sense acting like an alphabetic language. Kanji seems to have a thousand or two characters in use, whereas katakana and hiragana have around fifty.
Beyond looking up stroke numbers and radicals, I found dictionary usage for Chinese characters somewhat hard--English lets you basically do a very easy binary search on a word (start at most significant character, find section, move to next most significant character, etc.).
Bad in what way exactly? Hiragana and Katakana are easier to pick up, because there is more burden placed in learning each individual word. With the baseline investment to learn the Kanji in place, each new word is just a composition of characters and their associated ideas that you already know.
You can do the same thing with dictionaries in Japanese or Chinese, though it works best if you use a dictionary that lets you handwrite in the characters (it helps a lot if you learn your radicals and stroke orders well, so that you can easily write characters you don't know).
Oh, so, my point was that using Japanese was a bad example, precisely because two of the three alphabets are used nonlogographically. It is also my understanding that new words and loanwords are spelled out phonetically in those alphabets, instead of grafting some new character into the kanji.
"if you use a dictionary that lets you handwrite in the character"
I'm unfamiliar with any paper dictionary with that capability.
"Chinese characters (and similar writing systems) do have certain advantages versus alphabetic systems though."
You end up with much lower population literacy rate than countries with alphabetic systems. ex) China at 92% vs Korea at 99%.
Hangul was created 600 years ago to counter the difficulties faced by ordinary citizens attempting to memorize the Chinese alphabets. Hangul also by far one of the more exotic alphabet system. This video sums it up nicely:
Finally, with an appropriate method, it doesn't have to take years to learn enough characters to write and read literately, I can read Japanese at a high school level, and I've been at it for a year and a half.