I dunno that Morse loses you hack points. There's quite a bit of overlap between hackers and hams -- I'm just not part of that overlap. (Though I've always felt slightly ashamed of not having gotten around to acquiring any skill with Morse code.) For someone who already knows Morse, that would just Make More Sense than binary; I imagine it would be about as easy at the listening stage as having a speech synthesizer speak the numbers between samples. And as for hack value, it's got better "look what I did" qualities than "I printed out binary" does.
So maybe Morse would have had more some-other-kind-of-geek cred, but not actually at the expense of hack cred.
You are exactly right about the listening stage. For me, the 'dah-dah-di-di-di' sounds exactly the same as a '7' looks. At my best time, the mind was not at all involved in the decoding; the sounds flowed right from the ear to the hand holding the pencil, and while the hand was transcribing the traffic, I was free to think of other things -- including listening to completely different networks on other radios.
(no subject)
So maybe Morse would have had more some-other-kind-of-geek cred, but not actually at the expense of hack cred.
(no subject)