English really is a disaster of a language. There was a(nother) great XKCD about it just a few days ago. https://xkcd.com/2907/
There is no way it can work.
People don't care about governing bodies when they speak a language.
Ie, the governing body decrees that the regionalisms from the dominant region is the definitive version of the language. But it might be considered cool to speak that way even without a governing body.
Maybe it's a totally different language but still it goes to show that even a very prestigious central authority doesn't make a language better or less prone to diverge. Regardless of the reason, French is evolving much more quickly than English.
The point of esperonto was to make it easier to learn. French is regular, but extremely complicated. English is complicated and has a million special cases. Both languages are hard enough to master that society starts to judge a person's intelligence by how well they know the rules and special cases.
Sometimes lack of rigidity is actually an feature that allows for things to sort of work that would be politically impossible if thinks had to be specified formally before being used.