For starters, as for the word-final "z" issue, with how I'm handling such, such does *not* create homophones, because /z/ and /s/ are still differentiated through a number of means, which result in many cases /z/ being "s" and /s/ being "ss", except in places where /z/ is simply not possible under normal conditions, where "s" just represents /s/, or where /s/ is strongly preferred over /z/, where "s" represents /s/ and "z" represents /z/. The basic rules, applied in order, are:
1. Word-initially, /s/ is always "s" and /z/ is always "z", no matter what are adjacent to them
2. Adjacent to an unvoiced consonant, /s/ and /z/ are both "s", as /z/ will be devoiced in practice
3. Intervocalically, /z/ is "s" and /s/ is "ss"
4. Word-finally, if following a vowel or a voiced consonant, /z/ is "s" and /s/ is "ss"
5. Otherwise, when adjacent to a voiced consonant, /z/ is "s" and /s/ is "ss"
Such may seem rather complex, but should not be that counterintuitive for people used to the existing English orthography. Consider that word-finally, "s" in this usually is the same as its counterpart in the existing orthography, and "ss" in this is usually is the same as "ss", "se", or "ce" in the existing orthography.
As for why the hell I decided to write compounds the German (and Dutch, and Scandinavian) way, there are a number of reasons. The first, yes, is consistency with the aforementioned language's orthographies, considering that significant aspects of this orthography are directly taken from the aforementioned orthographies. The second has to do with how stress is generally handled in compound words versus sequences of independent words; compound words generally have a single primary stress, whereas sequences of independent words generally have multiple independent primary stresses. Contrast "White House" as in where the US President lives (generally has one primary stress, on the first syllable) with "white house" as in a house that happens to be white (generally has two primary stresses, and if one is stronger, it is generally the second one); the two generally have different stress patterns, with the former being a single compound word and the latter being two separate words; writing compound words as single words only makes this more explicit rather than having it be implicit for the reader. For example, in this case, the "White House" would be <Hwaithaus> or <Waithaus>, whereas a "white house" would be <hwait haus> or <wait haus>.
As for why the same vowels are often written different ways, the reason for this is that a Dutch-style double vowel rule is used for determining vowel orthographic "length"; the reason for this is to help get rid of any need for diacritics for vowels and reduce the need for non-doubling digraphs for vowels. However, this makes it so that orthographically "long" vowels have both undoubled and doubled versions, based on context, and that consonants that aren't inherently "doubled" (that is, single character ones besides "w" and "v") may "shorten" preceding vowels that would otherwise be "long" by being doubled. Hence, the values of vowels at the orthographic level are very contextually dependent, at the gain of basically eliminating the need for vowel diacritics and of reducing the need for digraphs. Of course, part of the reason why I used such a scheme is that practically all the Germanic language orthographies today, besides those of most likely Icelandic and Faroese, use some variation upon such a scheme, in one fashion or another. Of course, the orthography which takes such to its final conclusion is that of Dutch, with that of German being next closest, if one treats "h"s following vowels in it as being effectively the same as doubling them.
So why am I following preexisting precedents in other Germanic languages' orthographies so much here? This is because I want a clean break from the current English orthography, but yet I still want written English to *look* like a Germanic language, rather than a random mess of diacritics and "special" characters. Therefore, rather than simply trying to create a new orthography a priori, I instead used preexisting models in other Germanic languages' orthographies, especially those of Dutch and to some degree German, and fitted those to fit the needs of English, modifying them along the way when I had specific needs which there were not preexisting models for in other Germanic languages which could be easily translated to English. Another reason is that English dialects in general have far more vowel phonemes than there are characters available for them in Roman script, and yet I did not want to use diacritics at all, for practical reasons, or excessive quantities of digraphs and trigraphs, for aesthetic reasons, and Dutch orthography seemed to have solved this problem quite well, despite some minor weirdnesses in its overall design ("oe" in it comes to mind). Hence, Dutch orthography was one of the main models which I ended up basing things off of, for practical rather than ideological reasons.
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