[HansTWN]

I seldom need to use the rare characters, except for some strange family and first names used in China, I could always find the one I wanted among the 13000 characters the regular fonts offer. And being a Westerner, I have to ask my wife how to pronounce these very rare characters, anyway! The only font repository I ever bought for Chinese was many years ago from 全真. Chinese Windows now offers quite a wide range of fonts, which I find more than enough.

Interestingly enough the Vietnamese actually were successful with romanization. But they adhere to the strict rules I mentioned (see 1 and 2 again below). Vietnamese is a language which has its origins in Chinese and shares the same structure. It is as closely related to Chinese as French is to Italian.

1.)Every syllable is written as a separate word, even when two or more syllables make up one complete word.
2.)The tone marks are included.

Of course, Vietnamese has 6 tones, so not quite as many homonyms exist as in Mandarin with only 4 tones. Still some meaning gets lost, for example anh (first tone) can mean both Mr (先), or English (英), among others. Since there are no characters to distinguish the meanings you can only tell from the context what the writer meant. And it is a loss of culture, to some extent.

As much as it can be a pain to learn the Chinese characters, I can also appreciate their beauty and the historic value they represent. You are definitely right about the Chinese not planning to switch any time soon, that is a matter of national pride!