I agree. Read the rest of my post again and that should be clear - but maybe it wasn't.
People like you and I who learned to read with phonics don't use it much anymore. But we do use it for words we don't immediately recognize. That's not the way it was when we were learning to read. Then every word was new and we had to apply our phonics knowledge to figure out each and every word. Slow and painful but it works every time. And pretty soon you don't have to sound out every word. You know those words by sight.
That system works. Skipping the phonics part doesn't work.
Actually, I was agreeing with you. I just wanted to make the point that there was a hard and fast (and necessary) relationship between phonics and "look-say". Some people can master "look/say" directly, but the vast majority cannot, as witnessed by our current abysmal track record of literacy.