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Enigmatism415
I suppose that the Romanisation of English is less than useless then? The prose written in this very post are, technically speaking, a Romanised transliteration of the (West-Germanic) English language. As we are both well aware, the spelling of English words often poorly reflects their modern pronunciations, regardless of dialect, in favour of morphological consistency and at the expense of phonemic consistency. We retain these spellings to honour etymology and distinguish homophones (e.g. 'to', 'two', and 'too').
Possibly a bit pedantic, but really well said. We often make sacrifices like these in devising written systems, and there is really nothing wrong with that in itself. I understand the point of the post you replied to, of course: since romanization systems for Chinese languages are little more than tools that help us show how to read the characters they are usually represented by, it does make sense to keep strictly to sound mapping. However, when keeping in mind that a certain sound has merged with another, there is nevertheless no confusion in reading 你 as nei⁵ and 理 as lei⁵, yet pronouncing them the same. The same goes for distinguishing zi and zhi in romanization, but with n/l there's the additional argument that some people do make the distinction.