I just noticed your post count is 3131!313131!
Lets just make it 32!! 2^5 Then change to base 32 math!! that would make programing more fun!!
We could make it 32 easily by adding one of the daiphthongs I talked about. "ay" would probably be the best candidate.
Or we could add a silence character. Actually I categorized the letter h in sounded consonants but what it really is is a hard basic consonant. The reason I found it more convenient not to categorize it as such is because the soft basic equivalent of h is actually silence, which would be a pretty useless letter, so it does just as well to think of h without a corresponding character.
True too, there are other basic sounds that could be added to the alphabet like a "rounded a" which is pretty much a mix of 'a' and 'ä' found in words like "father". In my opinion though, it's not a distinct sound. In the end, you have to consider that English is an extremely diverse language (among regions) and having separate characters for something so similar to 'ä' when you could just use 'ä' itself is just going to get confusing between dialects.
