[schoen]

Doesn't Lojban try to have pretty easy phonotactics or something? They do have consonant clusters, but I thought they did some kind of study and chose their phonemes and some rules on the basis of things that most languages wouldn't find too difficult.

Edit: not suggesting that Lojban's solution is somehow preferable to your advice, just trying to remember what they did about this issue.

[jcranmer]

Lojban uses the consonants I gave (sans /j/ and /w/, although these are counted as dipthongs instead), plus /f/, /v/, /x/, /ʔ/, /h/, and /r/, as well as /ə/ for a sixth vowel. The syllable scheme seems to be largely C(C)VC(C), with largely only mixed voiced/unvoiced and geminate consonant clusters prohibited. That said, they do allow for "buffer" vowels in pronunciation to aid speakers who have trouble with consonants (and yet they have a /ə/?).

From what I can tell, CV(C) (with the second consonant usually having some restrictions) is fairly widespread. However, in my personal (purely anecdotal) experience, pronouncing foreign consonant clusters or unfamiliar final consonants is much harder than pronouncing unfamiliar initial consonants or vowels, so I'd be slightly wary of letting the final consonant go too unrestricted.