Everybody knows that languages naturally evolve on their own. The advantages of the "Académie" are:

  - it slows down the evolution allowing better choices.

  - although the language is still driven by everybody using it, it is stirred in the right direction by linguists and authors, usually making choices consistent with the rest of the languages, its history and roots.

I am really fond of the "Real Academia Española" as they go even further than their french counterpart, and regularly change the spelling of words to reflect their modern pronounciation.

What mess would that be, exactly? Those who care about English tend not to use terms like this. Conversely, correct French is replete with special cases and arbitrary deviations from consistent logic.

Also, word composition doesn't necessarily need to be associative ;)

   biweek/ly- once every two weeks

   bi/weekly- twice every week

In Spanish you don't remember the spelling of most words, the spelling is just an encoding of a neutral pronounciation. Even if there are some irregularities, you remember the irregularity instead of the whole word. For instance, you would remember "kamikaze both k".

So most spellings get fixed on their own. Not bashing on the RAE though, they made such a nice job making this possible.

Edit:wording

I think we all agree no one can force anything on a language, but at least having standards that are phonetic, have no exceptional rules, etc, gives you a solid reference. Of course, plenty of the standards bodies don't do this and just make it even more convoluted such as the Scharf-S rules in new germen rechtschreibung, and all the new english words copied verbatum that don't follow standard german rules, which leaves everyone just sitting there guessing...

The problem would still be there for meanings. Who deicide the meaning of a word in a given context when it has become ambivalent (e.g.: biweekly)?

Also, dictionaries based on accepted usage (ask ten random native speakers whether they consider spelling ___ to be acceptable) give most of the advantages of dictionaries based on dictate (what the academy thinks).

The Académie does that too, but people are so used to having irregular or (apparently) illogical spelling that the new spellings catch on very slowly. It works though, and today you rarely see someone write "clef" instead of "clé" or "cuiller" instead of "cuillère". A few verbs got their accents changed from "é" to "è" too, following modern pronunciation. All that was in 1990.

What about all the spelling we never pronouce ("ils mangent")?

If the Académie doesn't do anything about it, eventually people will create their own simplifications, and that is guaranteed to be a mess.

There must be some basic cognitive bias here, like valorizing too highly the literature you loved in your youth, while discounting the creative innovations of your own age.

It's been a quixotic quest, at best, it's not as if in regular speech (French) people didn't inject whatever was the argot dujour into the speech be it domestic or foreign.

On the one hand I agree with you. The English we use now, even when written or spoken in a grammatically perfect way, is very different to the English used a couple of hundred years ago.

On the other hand, seeing "your/you're" or "they're/their/there" used incorrectly or interchangeably rustles my jimmies immeasurably.

As far as I know the biggest issue French is facing is the injection of English words where there isn't a French equivalent.

Then again, French people seem to absolutely loathe the version of French spoken in Quebec so there could be a plethora of other issues involved that we don't have in English.

Regarding your second point, personally I'm not sure but ignorance certainly plays its part one way or another.

And certainly not isolated to English. I find internet lingo in non-English languages far more interesting than those in English (at least when we are talking about something else than simply using the English loanword), since the Internet is largely an English-written concept, other languages are finding its incompatibilities with English difficult and the solutions can be quite interesting.

I find the anglifications of languages to be uninteresting at best, from a completely linguistic standpoint. Take a modern item like a 'vacuum cleaner', called »støvsuger« in Danish, which literally translates as 'dust sucker'. This reveals a difference in how each language's speakers think about items, words and their meanings.

If all words are English, then the languages themselves reveal nothing about our differences and how we think. Moreover, it will cause us all to think in the same way. It's documented that speaking more languages helps one think different about approaching problems, even ones not related to language. It broadens the mind. Everything being English won't broaden the mind.

The weird thing is that in the longer turn it results in a much larger problem: irrelevance.