This is probably the single biggest hamstring of Chinese culture, historically. It's amazing the levels of literacy that were achieved at times during the pre-modern period, given how complex the writing system is. Imagine what could have been with an alphabetic/syllabic system - you can teach a six-year-old how to read 95%[1] of English words in one year of schooling, since they only need to learn 26 letters and perhaps 100 common groupings of them, most of which do follow similar patterns.

[1] Statistics drawn from that orifice where all off-the-cuff statistics are drawn, but you get the general idea