[notahacker]

Eliminate gender, simplify the conjugations, deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality. Throw in some loan words from English to expand the vocabulary and keep the Anglos happy (with regularised orthography and conjugations, naturally). And encourage people to slow down when they speak

Do all this, and you'll have a very user friendly language that half the world's population will be able to pick up muy rapidamente

(I have a feeling this is going to end up like the joke about eliminating all the problems with British spelling, which is achieved by progressively turning it into something sounding like comedy German...)

[Maken]

>deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality

I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted". When you are writing to someone you are not very familiar and you want to sound more formal the way to go is to use a "implicit usted", which means you refer to the other person by name but use the third instead of the second person. Anyway, better avoid using "usted" directly, it sounds awkward in almost any situation.

[Turing_Machine]

'I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted".'

This varies a lot between different Spanish-speaking countries. Heck, in Argentina they still use "vos".

[Maken]

But that's different, because in Argentina they have replaced the second person and "tú" by the third person and "vos". For them it's not a formal addressing at all.

However, I won't deny that for most Spanish-speakers Argentinians sound surprisingly polite.