That’s self-imposed complexity. It's not a matter of complexity for its own sake. The standard transliteration an intentional trade-off that favors accuracy/f

That’s self-imposed complexity. It's not a matter of complexity for its own sake. The standard transliteration an intentional trade-off that favors accuracy/fidelity over accessibility to lazy English speakers. Berman has a point that a simpler system would make stuff easier to pronounce and recognize. But you'd be losing a lot of important signal and creating all kinds of other confusions (especially in dictionary entries) if you apopted that kind of a system as your standard. For example the Х is always a "kh" sound, as in the Scottish loch, and never a "h" sound (which doesn't exist in Russian). Meanwhile if one does see a Cyrillic name transliterated with a pure "h" sound it's a good sign that it references something in Ukrainian (where the sound does occur and is quite common). Also if we squish Щ down to "sh" then we're colliding with the representation of Ш which represents the pure "sh" sound. So you'd be creating all kinds of collisions is if you smushed these two letters down into the same representation. While "shch" is mouthful for Anglophones - it at least tells them that something is going on, and that it's not the same as "sh" in either the Cyrillic representation or the sound. Point being - there are reasons for the system the way it is, and it's not about pedantry really. (BTW yes, these sounds do drift regionally and all that but that's a whole different topic).