[latentsea]

Being able to guess the meaning of new words was neat earlier on in the Japanese journey, but in the end the problem of "gah but the how hell do you actually read this?" was a greater detriment than that was a benefit.

In contrast if I saw なこうど I could at least be perfectly confident I was reading it correctly even if I didn't know what it meant. Sometimes I may be able to guess from the context at least partially what it means, but if not, then I could simply opt to move on having collected an instance of seeing the word. I might then later hear it elsewhere, or perhaps see it again and if I encounter it enough times I can get curious and look it up.

I could do the same thing with Kanji except I'd have to look it up anyway to be confident I was reading it correctly. Else I just don't know what the word is, so its harder to mentally file it anywhere in my brain. I found this lead to a very long-tail of pain when reading Japanese that didn't abate even when I got up to around 17k vocab in Anki after which I just said bugger it.

So, on balance I prefer the set of problems that no Kanji poses over the set of problems that Kanji poses.

[vunderba]

I vastly prefer the ability to potentially infer the rough meaning of an unrecognized word, then the ability to pronounce it.

As an ESL CELTA certified teacher for years, their rubric also seems to back this up in order of relative importance: it's meaning, then form, then finally pronunciation.

[latentsea]

I don't know if a rubric for English is as applicable to Japanese.

You're just trading one set of problems for another. Those aren't even problems English has.