[iafisher]

The problem with making spelling more phonetic is that not everyone pronounces English the same. Even a single country like the United States or the United Kingdom counts a range of accents and dialects. A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers.

[pmoriarty]

"A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers."

Only if there is a single "correct" (or canonical) way to spell each word.

If every speaker uses a phonetic alphabet to spell their words the way they speak them then there will be no problem reading them back phonetically.

Now, understanding these phonetically spelled words might be a problem for some readers, but that's no different from the problem in understanding they'd have when they heard someone speak in a different accent.

[Zanni]

Ugh, no. You'd gain the very minor benefit of being able to read in the author's dialect but at huge cost in reading speed. I cringe whenever an author forces an accent or dialect into their writing rather than simply noting that a character speaks with a particular accent. It forces me to read at the speed I can vocalize, which is about half my normal reading speed.

I can see this being useful for specific cases but not as a general practice.

[alangpierce]

There's even plenty of precedent for the same word having different spellings based on region, like with color/colour. I imagine it would be similarly normal to learn that "tomahto" is the British spelling of "tomato" (or whatever it would end up being).

[dsego]

We have that in south slavic languages. For example this word meaning time (or weather) spoken and written differently based on dialect/language: vreme, vrime, vrijeme. [1] Maybe a regional spelling reform could lead to English starting to break apart into several different languages?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects_of_Serbo-Croatian