See, now I tend to think that a primary purpose of joining an international forum would be to expand one's horizons a bit. I enjoy hearing and learning new expressions, and learning about regional differences in language and culture, and found DumDum's posts colorful and fun to read. I see no need to try to make everyone sound identical.
I also disagree with your last two sentences. Most people would have enormous difficulty replicating their accent, because most people think they don't have an accent -- they think it's other people who have them. Their speech, they think, is normal and unaccented. So with a blind spot like that, it makes it hard for them to identify those distinctive little quirks they would have to transcribe in order to pull off a successful rendering of their accents. So I would say it does take a special talent. Furthermore, if the writer is trying to imitate speech by writing it down, that's essentially the same thing as writing dialog for a novel or a screenplay -- and it takes a special talent to write it whether in bland, homogenized, vanilla-flavored English or utilizing regionalisms.
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