As far as my thoughts on romaji goes...
There really isn't any reason to use romaji. Japanese people don't write in romaji. Labels, signs, and other reading material are rarely in romaji - I did see some in the Nagoya subway systems from time-to-time.
Another problem is that there are different ways of writing romaji - in fact, there are more than 3 different systems of romaji, although one is used more often than the rest of them. For example, じょ can be written in one system as "jo", while in another it's written as "zyo". Some Japanese words are spelled with an 'o' sound, followed by an 'u' sound, but the romaji version will just be 'oo' instead of 'ou'. Confusing? That's why romaji is evil
.
Furthermore, particles get crapped on in romaji as well. In Romaji, you see "Watashi wa". But the '
wa' is not actually the '
wa' letter. The particle uses the Japanese '
ha' letter instead of '
wa'. When '
he' is used as a
particle it's pronounced like the Japanese letter '
e'. If someone learns romaji and doesn't know these particle nitpicks, they're going to have some problems once they switch to kana.
There are 46 hiragana and 46 katakana (although one of those is never used in katakana). It won't take that long to learn them. Ask yourself - does learning Japanese require learning the Japanese alphabet? Well sure it does! So why learn romaji? Romaji will get you nowhere. You need kana first, and then you move on to the dreaded kanji.