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With Japanese learners at least, you can tell with a great deal of accuracy whether someone used a romanization crutch or native script from the get-go based on how bad their accent is (anecdotal, but observation over many students). I'm don't know if this holds true of Chinese, though.

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Hiragana and katakana are pretty easy to learn, so if someone doesn't learn them quickly, it might be evidence they aren't working hard or efficiently to learn the language or aren't really ambitious. Chinese characters are a different story. I studied Chinese intensively for a year, and now I know almost know Chinese. I blame my failure partly on being forced to learn the characters from the beginning. The characters took 90% of my study time.

A similar comparison would be learning Bopomofo and using that when knowledge of the characters fails.

Is that because learning the kana helps? Or because being willing to learn to kana upfront is correlated with being willing to put effort into learning pronunciation?

Probably both. I think kana helps you process the words as sequences of "syllables" instead of characters. At least it did for me. I suppose that English speakers would get even more benefits because English pronunciation is often very far from how a word is written and sometimes doesn't make much sense.

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