http://painintheenglish.com/case/4547/#comment-17489

I totally disagree. I'm gonna miss the hyphen. The hyphen is wide open space: rest your eyes, take your time, figure it out. Sure it takes more brain bits to process five characters than four, but we've now created a row of letters that are ugly when viewed close together (to the glancing eye, it might read 'snail') to create a word that forces one letter to carry a syllable alone.
("We're gonna have another 'awhile' on our hands!").