No trade-off is possible. A spelling to suit readers would handicap writers. If it was easy to learn it would be clumsy to use, and handicap users. This pessimism will be looked at carefully. The design of English spelling is a new, wide and still almost empty field for empirical research.
Spelling is far more important to our social fabric than is generally realised.
But spelling means more than that in society. Orthographic change in any society is related to social change . Writing systems have a function in maintaining or changing social structure. They are an element of control in education. International written English has a significance we ignore to our detriment today.