The big downside of this is lack of redundancy. QR codes are incredibly redundan...

The big downside of this is lack of redundancy. QR codes are incredibly redundant. check out images 6 ("lose an edge") and 10 ("blob of paint") in the page: http://datagenetics.com/blog/november12013/index.html

Both of these scan perfectly fine with QR. And in HR, those (and most of other damaged examples) would be unreadable.