[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

A guess as a beginning Japanese learner: Japanese has a lot of homophones because it has so few syllables. It is also almost always written without spaces. Kanji is actually pretty helpful in reading because it provides semantic meaning that disambiguates homophones as well being more terse and breaking up the writing along grammatical boundaries.

I'm approaching this from the angle of wanting to understand video-game Japanese, and when I am trying to parse some 8-bit era all-katakana chunk of text I find myself wishing it included kanji even though I can only recognize a few dozen just so the grammar is more clear.