If you say t'meito and I say t'mahto, and a Spanish speaker says tomato and a Korean speaker says 토마토 and a Japanese speaker says トマト, none of which are phonetically the same, it seems like spelling it 'tomato' is as good a system as any.
To introduce phonetic spelling into English, you'd need to either privilege one dialect's pronunciation over all the others (which speakers of those other dialects would be unlikely to accept), or else you'd end up with far greater spelling variation between different dialects of English than exists at present (which would harm international communication.)
The other problem with phonetic spelling is that phonology changes faster than orthography. If we adopted phonetic spelling tomorrow, then within a few generations many of those spellings likely wouldn't be phonetic any more. Keeping orthography reasonably fixed over time (even as pronunciation changes) makes it easier for us to understand the written texts of past generations.
I heard in Turkish they went with another option: everything is spelled phonetically, and there's a `standard' pronunciation / spelling. But I heard of a case where some people spell a word differently, because they pronounce it differently. (And that's seen not as a failing of these people's spelling.)
I'm Australian we mostly use British English. The biggest complaint for me is in Programming language API's. "colour" vs "color" and "centre" vs "center" have cause me so many syntax errors.
For example with the last spelling reform, the rules for writing an ß or ss got streamlined. The rules follow the pronounciation of _some_ German speakers. If your region doesn't have the same pronounciation you can't rely on that but have to learn the rules.
German being a pluricentric language and therefore people knowing that one spelling doesn't fit all, different spellings for different regions is just a pragmatic matter of fact. The various governmental and non-governmental organizations that work together for defining the official spelling just try to minimize the rules for spelling. So that German spelling doesn't become the abomination that English or French spelling is. ;-)
Also we should remember that the official spelling is not mandatory. Nobody will sue you if you write "kuhl" instead of "cool" (unless you are a civil servant). There are of course soft factors at work so that your spelling isn't that far from the official one but there are still lots of people that write according to the old rules from before the spelling reform from 1996.
"Let them write how they feel writing, don't interrupt their creative processes with not so important rules".