spelling reform to meaningfully move in a phonetic direction

A phonetic respelling would destroy the languages, because there are too many dialects without matching pronunciations. Though rendering historical texts illegible, a phonemic approach would work. But that would still mean most speakers have 2-3 ways of spelling various vowels. You could predict pronunciation from spelling, but not spelling from pronunciation.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_pronunciation

But we shouldn’t always do this. When you have morphological spellings like the plural -(e)s, which can be phonemically predicted from pronunciation (whether there’s a vowel sound or written e) while ignoring the specifically realized phoneme (/z/ in rags, /s/ in rocks.) -ed maps to pronunciations of /d/, /t/, /ɪd/.

Now, protests against current English spelling are largely critiques of etymological spelling, but not entirely. In some cases, letters were added (b in doubt, s in island) where no sound had ever been, which can be easily removed. A bigger issue’s that pre- in prejudice and prequel or nat- in nation and national are pronounced differently although they’re clearly the same form. A phonetic or phonemic spelling would only obscure the connection and cause trouble for students learning to read etc.

There’s 5 century long history of attempted reforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform and parodies: https://www.tau.ac.il/%7Epauzner/funs/simpler.html and internet communities with their own approaches.

Gerhard H. Balg’s 1895 translation of Braune’s Gothic Grammar features a minimally reformed spelling:

Sum of the explanations ar due to Bernhardt’s critical notes in his ‘Wulfila’ to which I hav often referd. The Notes wer much more comprehensiv before the glossary was workt out, but many of them hav been transferd to the latter, in a few cases without being deleted in their first place, as I observd in reading the proof-sheets.

The dubl sign kw (kv) which is uzed beside q for the Gothic character is due to … nothing certain can be inferd about the fonetic value of Goth. q, altho it is possibl…

Besides, most speakers aren’t aware of what they’re phonetically saying. Are the p’s and t’s p in stop and spot the same?