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Regarding writing systems for English, have you seen this one? We had to learn about it when growing up in Utah: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet
As a Utah native, I'm curious what decade you were taught this. I've never seen it before, but it looks pretty similar to one I created as a kid to pass secret messages back and forth with a friend.
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Until Chinese romanizes it will never be a lingua franca. Simply far too hard to learn the written word, Simplified or not.
It doesn't matter how difficult a language is to master to gain the status of a lingua franca. Have you tried learning Russian? Or Latin? Or ancient Greek? I mean English has such a bizarro spelling system it may as well use pictograms. You might as well say "English will never be a lingua franca unless the English speakers overhaul their spelling". English is where it is because of the double historical whammy of th…
What does a learner of English need to be able to learn to write a word? 26 * 2 symbols, and a fair understanding of the most basic spelling rules to give any word a basic attempt at spelling. If you didn’t know the spelling of president, you could very reasonably guess your way through it (begins with a ‘p’, ‘z’s are pretty rare and I’d know if it had one, etc.) Contrast this with the modern state of China where actual teenagers have difficulties writing Chinese without the use of a computer because the written word is THAT vast.
I don’t see what your other examples have to do with anything…those are all languages that use an alphabet?