one for each English sound

The problem that I see is that there are ambiguities. For example, I say "tot" and "taught" and they sound exactly the same. My British office mate says two different "aw" sounds there. Or, USns tend to say "sorry" so it sounds like "sarry". When I say it, my "o" sounds like an O. My vowel sounds in "white" and "wide" or "lout" and "loud" are different (Canadian raising). But then, USns say the vowels in those word pairs exactly the same. So whose version of English would we standardize to? If we standardized to my version of English, say, then my office mate's spelling wouldn't differentiate the sounds he hears for "tot" and "taught", or you would see two different vowels for "lout" and "loud", though you pronounce them both the same.

That is what I see as the fundamental problem. I think it would be easy to deal with the consonants, but the vowels are "a whole nother story". And it's not just subtle differences in the vowels, but drastic differences in some cases.