I agree here! It's so much easier to learn for English or Spanish speaker. But still Chinese or Japanese speaker will learn Esperanto 10 times faster then English. Huge improvement.
> E.g. no non-gender pronoun, for some reason.
Well, most languages including English doesn't have non-gender pronoun. Yet in Esperanto officially you can use "ĝi" (it) or "tiu" (that person) for referring to the person of unknown/unspecified gender. But people seem not to use it often.
>Use of diacritics and extra pronunciation rules are also a negative.
Majority of languages use diacritics or non-latin writing system and steel doing fine. It's not that hard. But as a trade-off you get one sound - one letter philosophy.
> Moving to Esperanto would not save time at all, and would be significantly more difficult for the many people that now have to learn yet another very Euro-centric language with complicated. And, there's really very little benefit to switching.
Moving to Esperanto is like moving from Latin numbers to Arabic. Yes, sorry, it will require at least some learning to use.
> Making up a language won't gain traction. Even most programmers can't figure out how to write/read decent programming languages
We don't need most to create something good.
> Why on earth would we think the rest of humanity will accept it for spoken language?
I don't thing so. But there are good reasons mentioned in this comment.
> And at any rate, it'd have to be a lot better than Esperanto or alternatives for it to be worthwhile.
It's pretty awesome, really. I was skeptical too until I tried.