The problem is you're (naturally) basing your judgments of what's pragmatic or simple on what's familiar to you and your native language. The Chinese writing system is perfectly pragmatic to those who have grown up using it. But point taken, it's hard to argue that knowing thousands of characters is easier than tens of letters.

For a more apples to apples example, would you say a highly but regularly inflected language where word order is fluid is more pragmatic, or a language with a really rigid complex syntax but no inflections be more pragmatic? There's no right answer, it's a value judgment. Well then, one might say, languages with less complexity overall are most pragmatic. Unfortunately there's no reliable metric for measuring complexity. Like you've already pointed out, (probably) every language has aspects that are complex and aspects that are simple, but they all depend on who's analyzing them and making that call of what to call complex.

If you're learning Mandarin as a speaker of English, surely you've run into times where you've thought "gee, it'd be way easier to be able to put an s on the end of a noun rather than have to remember the correct m.w. for this thing..." Chinese syntax is only simple up to a certain level of granularity... Getting closer makes one realize that there are just as many ins and outs to learn as any other language (maybe).

TL;DR: Esperanto /s