I don't see how cursive script makes Arabic less “modern.” It might make carving it onto stone a bit harder, but the printing press, the typewriter, and the computer all had no problems producing quality Arabic type.

Having written code which renders Arabic text, I found “joining” up the letters to be quite simple. It's just a few rules to choose which glyph to display for each character depending on context. The tricky bits, I found, is in integrating a right-to-left script with systems which were made with only left-to-right in mind.