I recommend familiarizing yourself with the languages that these Chinese characters encode to better answer that question. Homophony is extremely common in Mandarin; eliminating characters would make reading very very difficult.
Chinese is not the only language that uses these characters. Japanese and Korean do too. For these groups, the learning curve is much less; that something does not come easy to English speakers is not evidence of its inherent deficiency.
Chinese is not the only language that uses these characters. Japanese and Korean do too. For these groups, the learning curve is much less; that something does not come easy to English speakers is not evidence of its inherent deficiency.