I have never met a Chinese person who regretted the creation of the characters. Rather the opposite... In fact, the characters tended to go phonetic, and ever

I have never met a Chinese person who regretted the creation of the characters. Rather the opposite... In fact, the characters tended to go phonetic, and every time, the Chinese pushed them back to representing concepts, because that was the only way for the Emperor to communicate within his vast empire of mutually unintelligible dialects. I'm not sure I would call them either icons or pictograms, though. Some are pictograms, but some are sort of phonetic (category radical + "sounds similar to this other character"), and most are derived in other fashions. Certainly the simplicity of icons is missing. (But for that matter, the original topic of icons, Christian saints, is missing in all icons. The original icons didn't even express concepts, they expressed people...)