If English spelling is unphonetic, French is even more so. I believe that Benjamin Franklin tried to devise a way of writing English that was more phonetic than the “standard” of his time. Apparently Chaucer’s dialect of London English was written in a more phonetic manner than modern English, too, although we wouldn’t recognize all the letter uses (e.g. “y” for “long e” in all cases).
I’m not bothered too much by loanwords if there isn’t a native word that is not quite as descriptive. At least English isn’t like Japanese, which has a separate syllabic alphabet for foreign loanwords (katakana) along with a duplicate one for native words (hiragana) and the Han character set (kanji) on top of all that; three parallel writing systems.
The spoken language is a totally different thing which still has enormous variations, and even dialects like it's some primitive third-world tongue (which it is in much of the francophone world).
An astute business oriented American would be wise to learn Spanish and written French however. That way you can more easily make your way on the autostrade around Milan as well as the main concourse in Charles de Gaule Airport!