alt Hacker NewsThis is how I learned cursive in school, and it never occurred to me that this may interrupt my writing flow. I agree that doing the backtracks after writing the entire word would add to my mental load, but that's probably because I'm not used to that.
So generally, I'd say that the mental load is basically a matter of how one learned cursive in the first place. Though I agree that the mostly backtrack-free Cyrillic cursive looks more elegant.
Would be interesting to learn about the perspective of people who learned Chinese or Japanese as their first script.
Cursive isn't seen as being fancier than the reference form of a character in China. It's something you do to make writing easier.
I've gotten comments about how neat my Chinese writing is from people surprised that I don't use handwriting. There's a simple reason for that: I've never learned how to do Chinese handwriting.