The jumbled words: it's not that surprising because we're expert at fitting things into patterns and categories, so we glance at a mixed-up word and recognise it. One of our weak points, though, that has led to many disastrous mistakes including serious accidents, is that once we've fitted something into a familiar category ("this is just another case of...") we can be very resistant to rejecting the categorisation as evidence piles up that we got it wrong.
Regional dialects: most languages were still developing and had regional variations when Gutenberg came along - even over as small an area as Latvia, say. I don't think the inconsistancies come from regional variation so much as from the English/Scottish/Welsh habit of slurring words. Also perhaps when received national spellings were established in the 18th century, they took more account of the origin and meaning of words than of the pronunciation even then. That said, it's also easy enough in most cases to look at a German or French compound word and work out its origin and meaning. I think we just play fast and loose with pronunciation more. The languages where spelling and pronunciation most closely agree are ones like Finnish which was hardly ever written down till very recent times (second half of the 19th century), and German wasn't respectable till the end of the 18th century. However, this doesn't explain why English pronunciation and spelling are further apart than with French or Spanish. | 
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