2000 seems like an underestimate to me. I'm learning chinese, and recognize around 2400 characters, but I still often run into characters I don't recognize when I read newspapers. That said, I feel like you're overstating the difficulty here. Yeah, there's a lot of characters, but there's a logic to them, and it gets easier after you learn a few hundred. Also, in today's world, with technology, you can just copy+paste new characters, or write them: digital dictionaries have handwriting recognizers. There's no need to use a paper dictionary.
And while it's true that chinese is tonal, to suggest that you can't use voice tone expressively is, frankly, absurd. It's every bit as expressive as english is. Maybe not if you're a beginner in the language and are still struggling to produce the tones accurately, but once you've got the accuracy down, you can get a lot of mileage out of how emphatic you make your fourth tone, how much your voice dips on a third tone, how long your first tone is, when you pause, what you emphasize, etc. Tones are scary and hard at first, but they're not complicated, and the rules are really consistent: Once you get the basics, it's just a matter of practice.
Also, there's definitely things about chinese that are hard, but there's also so much about chinese that's easy, too. This article reads almost like you're trying to make it sound scarier than it really is.