Japan has a somewhat analogous Kanji kentei that is highly competitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei

I want to point out that one of the sources for that quora answer is this post on Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5669), which is well worth reading. There's quite a lot of good reading there about spelling, writing systems, and so on.

Consider the imperial vs metric debate: the costs are humongous, the resistance immense and the advantages dificult to justify.

In addition there's a sense of pride in all those things that makes us different. It's one of those tasks easier to accomplish in a declining empire indeed.

Definitely. I wonder if there will ever be an attempt to simplify (and make more consistent) the english orthography, similar to the 1996 german orthography reform.

Webster made just such an attempt and it was responsible for a lot of the US/UK spelling divide.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/spelling-reform

The issue with English is not just orthography, it's pronunciation. The lack of a correspondence between spelling and sound means that pronunciation is free to change. And since it became different in each region or country, to enforce a writing system that matches phonemes would either cause the language to be written differently in each region, or people to modify their pronunciations in accordance to the new writing system. We're talking about Americans starting to speak in British English or vice versa.

Yeah, part of what makes spelling bees so bizarre to me, is that there is no orthography (This is touched on in the mumu muumuu example).

Given that they use MW, how long until "dord" is asked? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dord

Unlike a lot of other European languages, there's no central authority to make that decision. Even the German reform added differences between German and Swiss spelling.

There've been multiple attempts to simplify English orthography.

the first japanese spelling bee is still going on