I agree about gaol for one reason in particular: It violates the otherwise pretty strong rule that Gs before As are hard, as in GAME or GALL. According to English’s own rules, gaol should homonymous with gale or else pronounced gay-ole. Similar problems exist the British spelling of sceptic (instead of skeptic) and pronouncing Celtic as if it were spelled Keltic. No good reason for violating what rules we do have.

Major national style guides include:
UK: The Oxford Guide to Style
US: The Chicago Manual of Style
AU: The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide
AU: The Australian Government Publishing Service Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers.

Many institutions that have no internal style guide use an appropriate national or professional (e.g. medicine, law) style guide — and often add their own specific in-house requirements to those external basics.

Reputable style guides are far more useful than mere dictionaries when one seeks orthographical guidance.

And to those inflexible prescriptivists who can’t let go of the over-simplified “rules” they were taught in primary school (and thereby demonstrate their limited understanding of the language), note this: there are very few rules but many conventions.

Settle on your style/s and conventions, then be consistent in their application throughout a document or series of documents. Inconsistency is both sloppy and unprofessional.

Re paralleling English and Latin: Don’t bother! English is not a Romance language; it is primarily Germanic in origin, though it is probably the world’s most mongrelised tongue, an inveterate borrower and importer of other languages’ words.
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Verbivore (philologist and author of numerous in-house style guides) from Oz

Some of us in the USA dream of a future version of the English language with phonetic spelling (as in Italian).

BTW, the word British also refers to the original inhabitants of the British Isles and their descendants (ref Michael Wood the historian).