Esperanto is indeed not culturally neutral (and was never supposed to be), but it's still vastly better in practice than other European languages precisely because of this overemphasis on Latin (and Greek) roots - because those are exactly the "fancy" words that tended to be borrowed most often historically even across language families.

Also, interestingly enough, Esperanto attracted more interest in some Asian countries - most notably, Japan - than in much of Europe.

I think the bigger problem with Esperanto is phonology. It's too heavy on affricates, including some relatively rare ones (e.g. phonemic "ts"), and the consonant clusters get pretty bad. For someone coming from a simple CV language, those are likely to be a bigger challenge than the word list.