RE: Putting the oh in ou
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Well, to be fair, using 'ou' in English seems almost intentionally misleading as the default pronunciation would be 'ow'. There are, of course, exceptions (as there always are in English). Four and tour come to mind as counter examples. To an English speaker, Cho would be more obvious. Even Choh or Choe and they would probably get it right. In American English at least the sound in goose and chew are pretty much the same.
To me, the correct pronunciation of wabi-sabi is the natural one but I suppose I can see how someone would get that wrong too...though you wouldn't think someone voicing a documentary would.
I took a semester of Japanese in college (not that I remember all that much now). Speaking/pronunciation actually didn't seem all that hard. Reading and writing on the other hand...
It's a good point. This is why the Hepburn system does suggest ō instead of ou, but like I said, marketing doesn't like macrons and so the ou becomes common in product names. Very few people in Japan are aware that English people might pronounce ou differently than they do, so no one suggests changing it.
Pronunciation overall isn't bad. r is tricky, and the ryu/ryo/rya glides are more tricky. The rounded f which is more of an h is hard for many foreigners. There are a handful more. But yeah, overall it's not hard. More hard is the rhythm and intonation which is completely different from most Western languages and leads to most foreigns here having a very distinctive accent.
I'm no linguistics expert but how men and women speak in Japan seems quite a bit different. It might be an over generalization but when men speak it seems faster and everything runs together more. When women speak it's usually a bit slower and the words are enunciated more clearly...easier for a Westerner just learning the language to understand. Admittedly, I've never been to Japan so that idea comes more from what I've seen in movies/TV/anime than anything else.