Yet you still want some correlation between spelling and pronunciation, otherwise the writing system essentially becomes completely arbitrary and thus impossible to learn (since we humans rely so much on pattern recognition for learning).
(On the other side, it is much more difficult for us to learn English and get used to that disconection between alphabet and said words. And we don't have spelling competitions :).)
Trying to read (as schoolchildren) a few samples of text written in different dialects during that time dispelled any notion that it was a good idea.
Also: China (as another poster pointed out).
EDIT: Btw, if you have a good grasp of English accents, it's pretty easy to see what kind of chaos would occur in a country as small as England. (Thinking of the "north south divide" thing.)
So how does Finnish compare up? Do you not have silent letters?
In Dutch we have some useless things like combined letters: "c" and "h" are both used (like in "cake" or "hotel") but when combined to "ch" they sound like a "g". There are even duplicate ones: "au" and "ou" are both the same sound, and "ij" and "ei" too. You can't mix them though, "ijs" is ice and "eis" is a demand even though they sound 100% the same. I'm not sure about silent letters though, the "h" is audible even if only slightly.
I seem to remember that some (clearly not all!) of the horrible mess of English orthography originates from Dutch in fact, since some of the first people to run printing presses in England (or to print books which were distributed in England) were Dutch.
Wikipedia seems to back me up slightly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refor...
Any linguists fancy putting me straight on this?
Might have something to do with our western neighbours ;) (Yes, the ou in neighbours is on purpose.)
On the other hand, it's a bit funny to point those out as easy to deal with, because they are bicameral alphabets, with notions of upper and lower case, case mappings, title casing rules, and the like. That's a complex system, that if you didn't grow up with it and already have had to deal with and come to terms with it, you would probably include it in a rant like this.
There are also some non-phonetic aspects to the language, which I didn't really think about until taking Russian in college (sort of native speaker, took the class to make some friends.) For instance, "o" is frequently pronounced as "ah" (хорошо - horosho - is usually pronounced as 'harasho'.)
Every language has quirks.