Just today I had a chat with a friend about a movie named "rogue one". Roug, Rook, Roug, Rook. If feel quite fit writing english but talking - as someone with very litte practice - drives me mad.
That specific example points to the root cause of most English pronunciation weirdness - an insistence on preserving original spelling for loanwords even if they come from languages with very different orthography. "Rogue" and "chef" are both French loanwords that English still spells as if they were French, not to mention all the Latin loanwords that still give middle-schoolers endless pain.
Interestingly, "chief" is the same word as "chef" just imported from the Normans. French had a consonant shift, while English did not, and then imported the word again with the new pronunciation and spelling.
That vowel shift is not from French, but rather part of the English Great Vowel Shift [1]. The original loanword from Medieval Norman French to Middle English was /tʃeːf/ (spelled "chef"), compared to the re-borrowed /ʃɛf/.
Like fashion and law, spelling and pronounciation are a sign of status. It's not supposed to be easy. From another point of view, what does the state of the orthografy say about the authorities, are they lenient, chaotic ... speaking a different language?
School children are very low in the social hierarchy, of course, because they cannot defend themselves. Of course they are going to be oppressed when they note that there's no system behind and when they say it's too complicated they will be called lazy. The parents had to wade to shit, so they don't even notice the smell anymore, and now the children have to, too.
On the other hand, conservative orthography can help to learn the related languages (ie. French, Latin), serve as interesting step into history, exercise memory, and what not.
There could be no regular spelling. That's an illusory proposition, given the breadth of dialects that exist. So next you will require all the poor children to learn a new dialect, basically. Is that any better? It would be a loss of diversity, each one preserving a little bit of historic language development - and status. It's really a shame that status varies. Learning a language properly might give some stability.
