There was an initial effort to set up some rules in the 19th century, a highly confusing back-and-forth during the Drittes Reich period between Antiqua and Frak

There was an initial effort to set up some rules in the 19th century, a highly confusing back-and-forth during the Drittes Reich period between Antiqua and Fraktur-style writing, and the utter clusterfuck of a spelling reform you mentioned, which eerily reminds me of the Python 2/3 debacle. Going completely phonetic is also possible, but fraught with severe problems: - major convincing of all literate speakers required. - there might be more than one way to spell certain words if phonetic features of the language make it difficult. For example consonant clusters or vowel modifications by tones, such as in Vietnamese. Representing just the tones is also already quite tricky. - definite FU to the dialects since the spelling is going to be aligned to the prestige variant or to a compromise variant nobody speaks. - all existing literature would become difficult to understand within a generation or two. - A phonetic writing system, together with pronunciation rules a linguist would still understand in a few hundred years, makes it possible to fix pronunciation. We humans are surprisingly good at coming up with such systems. But languages still change, and the writing system will therefore accumulate artifacts. Cue the ğ in Turkish, which changed its role to a vowel lengthener. Going phonetic is still the rational choice when introducing an alphabet for a language that didn't have one before, or one of a different kind. You have to alphabetize people anyways, and there is not much literature yet.