I agree. As an Italian (where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read) it was straightforward to read. I have always wondered why English has so many weird pronunciation exceptions.
Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.
To give an example, number words are often covered 3 times in English - one from English (Germanic?) roots, one from Latin roots, and one from Greek roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix#Table_of_number...
one / uni / mono
two / bi / di
three / ter / tri
four / quad / tetra
surely there are regional accents of Standard Italian where different people say the same word different ways though, right? Does everyone speak it the same way and save variation for their local dialect?
It's common for people of one area to not understand dialects from a very different area, but the language is one, and you pronounce all the letters (almost, there are some exceptions, but they follow a rule), and if you were to write the dialect you'd write anything you say.
There are many variations on the cadence and on how some words are used, but generally speaking the language is the same everywhere. But then, of course, Italy is a small Country and only a few millions people speak Italian.
I wasn't hinting that one language is better than others, just that it comes very natural to us to read that alphabet. Once you map in your head some signs to some sounds it's almost all there (provided that you know enough English to infer which words are written for enough time to learn the missing signs).