The radicals make it far easier to read the characters. Radicals organize Chinese characters like a BTree index. By learning to see the radicals, you can an idea of what a character is even if you don't know the rest of the character, and you can learn faster.
Oh, absolutely. But its no guarantee of accurate meaning! A good example would be-- suppose the following words were characters: "to" "get" "her". Putting them together would nett: "together" -- a word that is nothing like its components.
Still, knowing the radical and the number of strokes required to make the character, one can look it up in a Chinese dictionary with some measure of success.
I'm old fashioned. I like the old-style characters. I think the simplified are pretty ugly.