Optimized to use less symbols by combining them (long gap between words is just three short gaps).
I also think if a sentence ends, there would be the unnessecary 0 from the dots and Dashes at the end.
Makes sense. I remember asking myself whether Morse was a form of Huffman encoding back when I was learning that stuff. And it kinda is going for that, but without actually doing it properly since it wasn't a binary code per se and so could use the pauses. "Ternary" makes sense.
Unless I'm mistaken I would say that it's the other way around, Morse code is more like a human readable machine language expressed in binary because the 26 character alphabet is expressed in different binary values, much like ASCII.