I just found out about Horatio Frederick Phillips' insane venetian blind cage wing airplane designs help... it actually successfully worked on a level competitive with the best designs of the time??? imagine an aeronautics timeline where we started with this as the baseline for some reason instead of what the Wrights figured out 3 years earlier
Yeah these are really cool! Hypothetically, if we started out with them, they'd still eventually be replaced for a few reasons I'll get into, but it's fascinating to think of the glorious decade or so of flying Venetian blinds we'd get!
One issue is that the airfoils interfere with each other, causing losses (the same reason biplanes have less lift per wing area than a monoplane). And the fact that the airfoils are so thin they require more external support also becomes an issue, you can't put useful things like fuel or wires inside the wing. Trans-sonic and higher speeds also cause some interesting issues with shocks.
That being said, weird Venetian blind/gridded airfoils survive today, in the form of axial compressors/turbines, and in grid fins. Both deal with shocks by using shaping techniques (though usually they don't do well near Mach 1), in these cases compactness and uniform flow are worth any other issues.
