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Changgi
take for instance, the pair 疆 and 江. Both have an -i- medial in Mandarin, but do both have that medial in Middle Chinese?
Mandarin's palatal series presents a special exception because /j/ /q/ /x/ may only be immediately followed by /i/ and /ü/. I believe that 江 was pronounced as /gang/ in Ming-era Mandarin, and according to MDBG, the Tang Dynasty pronunciation of 疆 was /giɑng/. You're correct in saying that the medials didn't completely vanish without a trace in Cantonese, but it's clear that Mandarin has a more complex system of medials, despite not perfectly aligning with those of Middle Chinese. This means that Mandarin maintains the benefit of syllable differentiation on the medial-level, while Cantonese does not to the same extent (or even close).
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Changgi
Some people just think Chinese doesn't have an alphabetical script and say they'll never learn it and abandon it. My friends have said things like "I'll NEVER get any of the tones right in years" and "I hate the kanji because they aren't totally phonetic and aren't alphabetical" and I've convinced them that it isn't the case with this and that, but as far as writing hanzi/honji go, You just have to write from left to right and top to bottom, horizontal before the vertical for a cross, outside to inside, etc. Saying that "I will never be able to learn them" is really exaggerated and it wouldn't be the case if one decided to learn it. It's always those strokes over and over again. When we're taught new characters, no one taught us how to write them, because after some time you'll grasp the idea of how to write honji, unlike what my friends claim: "you need to learn to write every new honji you see whereas you don't need to in an alphabetical script".
Bottom line, honji isn't as hard as people claim.
I agree.
I tell English-speaking students of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean that learning 漢字 is just as difficult as learning English orthography. Comparing the 26 letters of English to the 5,000+ characters of Chinese is tantamount to comparing apples and oranges; fair comparisons would include comparing the 26 letters to the 214 康熙部首, the Latin/Greek/French roots to 漢字, and words comprising multiple roots to Chinese compound words (if the student in question is learning a Sino-xenic language, I compare the core Germanic lexicon to the native lexicon of Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese).
Perhaps I'm blessed (or cursed) with being primarily a visual learner at the expense of speaking ability, but learning Chinese characters isn't nearly as difficult or arbitrary as foreigners make it seem.