Every language (without notable secondary dialects) with a recently defined orthographic system is "simpler" because its orthography seamlessly matches its phonetic structure. Give it another few hundred years of phonetic drift -- especially combined with dialect profusion -- and you'll find that this "beautifully simple" orthographic system is every bit as warty as English's is.

Just remember, there is an old enough English (dialect) where "knight" is pronounced "keh - nih - ch - t": where the orthography perfectly matches the pronunciation. It's just not any of the spoken dialects of modern English.