The standoff between the two camps is not as extensive as it appears to be. By one count, of the 2,000 most common Chinese characters, 1,369 share the same forms; out of the 631 with different strokes, only 178 characters need special memorization as the rest are simplified at the root form and are applied systematically.
In other words, it isn't troublesome for a mainlander to catch up on fanti, and it takes even less time for a fanti reader to familiarize himself with the less demanding jianti. Writing can be trickier than recognition. When I was editor for a US-based Chinese journal, I had to constantly toggle between jianti and fanti.
The obstacles are the few words for one form that do not correspond to the other. For example, the fanti "fa" in toufa (hair) is different from "fa" in facai (be rich), but the jianti character is the same. A computer program can't help you, and you need to edit each occurrence manually.
Personally, I feel fanti is more beautiful as the ideogram is closer to the original picture. I'm no calligrapher, but reading fanti enhances my appreciation of my native language, as it is written. That, however, raises the bar for literacy as it takes more effort to learn the extra strokes. Jianti, though standardized in the 1950s, can be traced back hundreds of years to the cursive form of handwriting and, some, to Japanese Kanji.
Most people, including natives, learn Chinese for practical reasons. They don't intend to become linguists or historians. Therefore, there should be a balance between the ease of learning for the maximum number of people and the preservation of the language as a cultural legacy. If you go to one extreme and keep everything intact, many new learners would be intimidated; if you cut down too much, the language may lose too much texture and visual richness.
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