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 weekIn 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.
Everybody knows that languages naturally evolve on their own. The advantages of the "Académie" are:
The best example of what happens when such a mechanism isn't in place is the "biweekly" and "irregardless" mess in english!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.