Should we make English spelling more "phonics friendly"?

According to Kate, If we don't make our spellings "phonics friendly" we will eventually lose phonics entirely.
SB: Language continues to change so 200 years from now there will be even fewer overlaps between the spoken and written word ...unless spelling is updated. Spelling reform means to realign the written and spoken word.
Spelling reform could be far short of a dictionary key. By one measure English is 7% phonemic compared to Spanish (85% phonemic). By simply dropping superfluous letters, English could come close to being 40% phonemic. A basic codes approach would respell only those words that did not conform to the 4 most frequent spelling patterns. If a spelling pattern was used over 10% of the time in the dictionary, it would not be dropped. Currently English has about 14-15 ways of spelling a phoneme. Reducing this to an average of 4 ways would be a significant improvement in regularity.
The reason for reform is to reduce the time it takes for illiterates to become literate.
Italians could still be writing Latin and speaking their regional dialect. The only downside would be that this divergent code would take over ten times as long to learn.
The Italian writers supported reform because it gave their works a much larger audience. It takes much longer to learn a written code for a language or dialect that you do not speak. It only takes 3 months (2 hrs.per day) to teach someone to read a highly phonemic code that accurately records the language you speak. Laubach teachers could teach illiterates to read a newspaper in 95% of the 30 written languages they worked with in 3 months. They were not that efficient when it came to teaching French or English.
Chris: Kate Gladstone, a handwriting expert, fears that if we don't sooner or later make our spellings "phonics friendly" (as most other phonics using nations and languages have done ) we will eventually lose phonics entirely.
KATE: Folks - If memory serves, it takes kids in Finland or Italy or Russia
about 4 - 5 months to learn to read. Then they can read anything accurately, they can spell anything accurately, and they can understand anything written down that they'd understand if they heard it spoken.
In our own language (with its more complex spelling) even with the best teaching it takes quite a bit longer than 4 - 5 months to get kids to that point.
In places like China (where the form of the written language prevents applying phonics), from what I hear it takes 10 years to get people that far - IF they ever get that far.
Most of us here (as I recall) agree that, the more easily/simply phonics applies to a written language, the more quickly a person taught with phonics will become full master of that written language. Most of us here also know that applying phonics to English has become harder and harder over time: as sounds and sound-sequences have changed over time, the task of applying the code to those sounds and sound-sequences has become more and more complex.
For instance, 600 - 700 years ago the "a" in "sane" stood for the same vowel-sound as the "a" in "sanity"- the "i" in "sign" stood for the same vowel-sound as the "i" in "signature," - the "k" and the "gh" in "knight" and similar words stood for actual consonant sounds - and so on and so forth. Now that people talk quite differently, we have a lot more to learn in order to decode and spell "sane/sanity," "sign/signature," "knight/knee/through," etc.
The system has become more complex - phonics teaching has therefore also had to become more complex and far more time-consuming than in the "olden days," so that we can continue to ensure that children learning phonics continue to learn ALL of phonics, continue to master ALL of the encoding/decoding system, however complex both time and chance have made it. Right?