It's interesting to me that spelling reform almost always seem to assume that the pronunciation of the word is definitive and it's the spelling that should chan

It's interesting to me that spelling reform almost always seem to assume that the pronunciation of the word is definitive and it's the spelling that should change. But there are words in English where the British pronunciation matches the spelling (been, in RP, for example) but the American pronunciation does not. I've always thought that any reform should leave a word alone if any major dialect of English pronounced it as it is spelled. The changes that I think would be the most helpful would be to get rid of archaic spellings such as the 'ough' mess, changing ph to f where appropriate, fixing up more of the -ice, -ise, -ize ambiguities, etc. Don't worry about things like doubled letters, that will sort itself out later.