realistic conlang orthography

I agree; a lot of conlang orthographies are unrealistically regular
(including mine, I'm sorry to say.)  I have the somewhat weak excuse that my
conculture basically left writing in the hands of academia for a long time,
and at some point someone became dissatisfied with the logographic system
that was in use, with all its flaws like its refusal to mark inflection, to
the point that the written language had to have a perceptibly different
grammar from the spoken one, and so eventually some linguist, irrated to
hell by this and inspired by the other local scripts (Obrenje and Nrit share
a conworld, so it's possible that Obrenje was among the inspirations),
devised an alphabetic script.  Of course, the academics heartily rejected
this; change is unacceptable.
But the priesthood, which thought it was brilliant to have a writing system
that the commons could handle, rapidly popularized the new script by
publishing prayerbooks, cookbooks, play programs, and the like in it - it
was dramatically easier to typeset this new script, and required much less
education to read.
So, for a few decades the academics clung to their loserly logographs, but
eventually gave them up for the alphabetic system, which is openly
artificial.

---
Shreyas