It wasn't a case of the character evolving. It was more that thorn didn't exist on printing presses imported from Germany where they had been invented and y was chosen as a common substitute.

Both happened. I did already mentioned the printing press point but there's a reason y was used specifically.

The thorn character originally looked more like the letter p but with time it lost the loop at the top of the character and became more like the letter y. (See [1] in my previous post for example)

Having grown up in England and never really paying this much attention to the etymology of the English language, I had always assume Ye to be pronounced exactly as it looks... Yee.

Am I right in interpreting what you're saying is that it's actually pronounced as "the" because the y is really just a print substitute because of the lack of thorn character on the press but would have still been pronounced when read as if it were the thorn character?

If that's the case, you have just unlocked a fascination of the English language I never had until this exact moment. Thank you, no more work is getting done today.

The "ye" business is the first thing the article mentions...

I got bogged down in the comment thread long before I read the article ;)

I never read the article first. I use the comments to decide if it is worthwhile, but very often I find the comments to be sufficiently interesting on their own and skip (not ship of course, I wonder where it comes from) the article altogether.