There are plenty of other transliteration systems that might lead to more accurate pronunciations for English speakers in particular (as opposed to say, native

There are plenty of other transliteration systems that might lead to more accurate pronunciations for English speakers in particular (as opposed to say, native Russian speakers); see Wade-Giles or Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The factors that led to the current de-facto standard are more related to 20th century history rather than optimizing for the particular use case of reading aloud by non-natives.