the Committee saw no pressure to introduce a phonetic system for Mandarin

This is particularly interesting to me: where did you get this?

Thanks for the thorough comment.

Easy/hard in which aspect? And how do we even measure it?

I’m confused as to if you read the article, since you point out Chinese characters later. Did you?

Similarly, Cherokee syllabary and Hangul for Korean. The former was even created by someone who was himself illiterate!