I don't think it's exactly correct to say that in Finnish there is [more] "effort to keep the written and spoken versions in sync".
I don't speak Finnish, but there is an interesting discussion on the blog Languagehat that I think is relevant: Finnish Language Maintenance. You would know better than I to what extent it is true, but my impression from what I have read about Finnish is that there is a situation of moderate diglossia: there is not one spoken version and one written version, but there are different versions of the language for "formal" use and for spontaneous use.
In Finnish, the "formal" version of the language is written, but also pronounced differently from the "spontaneous" versions (which is why standard Finnish has to be "maintained"). In other words, standard Finnish is a rather "artificial" language that speakers don't think of as having to be the same as the language that people naturally grow up speaking. It's easy to say that the spoken version is "in sync" with the written version because neither is expected to be the same as what native speakers use by default.
This is not the case for standard written English! For the most part, English speakers write as they speak, and are accustomed to thinking that they should speak as they write. There is no body that defines "standard" or "current" English language; it's just the most prestigious form that is based on things like the usage of famous writers of the past and powerful, upper-class or influential people of the present. The cultural expectation is that the language used in everyday situations by a native speaker with educated parents is "good" English. It's not just an artificial standard that no one is expected to follow outside of formal or written situations.
The language I'm using in this post is more or less the same as the language I would use speaking to a friend. Writing means that I can think about my words more, and so use more complex sentence structures, but the words and word forms that I'm using are all pretty normal for me in any kind of spoken situation.
Now, this situation exists for me as a relatively "privileged" American. There are certainly people who naturally speak varieties of English that aren't considered standard. However, they aren't just under pressure to use more "standard" forms in writing: they are also expected to speak "good" English in situations like job interviews, at minimum, and a number of people act as if using non-standard forms in any situation is "wrong".
There are some areas of pronunciation and grammar that tend to become simplified in informal contexts.
For example, I occasionally do say /wʊmən/ by accident for the plural form of "women", and although I don't think this is very common, I have read anecdotal reports of other people doing this (see New Zealand pronunciation of "women" vs "woman"). This pronunciation of "women" is stigmatized as uneducated. Spelling "wimmen" would also be stigmatized as uneducated. People with a good education are supposed to know unintuitive correspondences like this; if they were more regular, they would be easier to learn with less education.
Verbs with distinct past and past participle forms are fairly often simplified to make these the same (see Is the past participle becoming obsolete? (I have went)); particularly for certain classes of verbs, like the ones with i-a-u alternation such as drink, drank, drunk (many speakers use drank as a past participle).
But these kind of situations are not the norm. Most native English speakers don't say "spoke" because they consciously decided to do so: they say it because it's what comes naturally to them. So it makes sense to also write "spoke".
Of course, the letter-by-letter spelling of individual words in English is infamously irregular, but to an English speaker this is expected. To most people, it doesn't seem as artificial as using different inflections or grammar when writing would.
