@scottalanmiller Some are aware, but those who like the complex spelling tend to come from the point of view that memorising many spellings makes them intelligent, so a less complex spelling system would take that away from them. The astonishing part is that there is an obsession with spelling bees at all, the idea memorising a list of things makes on intelligent is just bafflingly bizarre.
Then there are those who claim that complex spelling means that it creates English's vast vocabulary, and I've seen this even in conferences related to the English language. This takes almost no effort to figure out how logically moronic this is, the idea the spelling of a word influences whether or not the word exists.
In college I went all the way to the Anglo-Saxon Studies program, primarily because the history of English was fascinating to me, because it's so unusual and complex compared to other Germanic languages. Hungarian, on the other hand, is barely any different than it was 1,000 years ago, and Hungarian needs some reforms, but compared to English, it's pretty easy, though spoken Hungarian is vastly more complex than spoken English. English is pretty easy to learn to speak, but really complex to learn to read/write. I've noticed a lot of people take pride in thinking "English is the most complex language" when it's absolutely not, it's pretty simple, though not as simple as Afrikaans or something, it's the spelling that slows people down.
My daughters learned to read and write almost all Hungarian words by the age of 5, however even now my youngest at 7 still has a lot of difficulty with spelling more complex English words.
Additionally, I hate how illogical-spelling -defenders say "the meaning is in the spelling" or "you can figure out the etymology from how it's spelled," this is 100% useless for children learning to read/write, and many times it's not even true.
I mean "island" is that related to insula? Nope, it's from "iland" and the "s" was added arbitrarily to make it "look more Latin." A lot of this crazy shit goes back to the creator of the first dictionary who had a photographic memory and thought anyone else who didn't was "a moron." He intentionally screwed up spellings. Additionally, Dutch speaking printers who didn't speak English would arbitrarily add letters to words like "ghost" and "though".
Why defend something so screwed up? Holy cow.
