Chinese has an almost comically severe version of this problem. Not only do a number of mutually unintelligible languages share the writing system, but converting everything to pinyin would also make the bulk of Chinese literature incomprehensible.
That's one reason why I disagree with the author of the article when he writes "Everyone pronounces sight, site and cite identically, so it is absurd (except for advocates of etymological spelling) that we have to learn to spell them all differently."
What he overlooks is that having three different spellings helps a reader to distinguish between the three different meanings. The sentence "Cite the sighting of the site." is much easier to understand than "Site the siting of the site."
If you only use pinyin to learn Chinese, you end up (or at least I did) getting confused by words like 在 zài (located) and 再 zài (again).
Dewey (the guy we get the numbering system used in many libraries) was looking to simplify English spelling. From the movement he was part of, we get spellings like tho for though and thru for through.
George Bernard Shaw used to mock English spelling with the word GHOTI. This, he pronounced fish as it took the gh from enough (or tough), the o from women, and the ti from nation.
As for changing spelling and grammar, that is a very difficult task, as we tend to get pedantic jerks like Samuel Johnson who were so enamored of Latin, that they cobbled up rules like "splitting infinitives is forbidden" because the infinitive form of latin (you may be more familiar with Spanish) verbs is a single word that cannot be split. And some people still get bent by the opening sequence of Star Trek ...to boldly go... omg! a split infinitive!
Yeah, a lot of Mandarin TV shows are subtitled for that reason (which has the side effect of showing you how terrifyingly quickly literate people can read characters).
