Ah, so it's another southern German dialect/Bayerish dialect? They are very interesting (unfortunately for English speakers there is not much information on them ).

Anyway, back to the original topic, I believe one reason why "c" and "ĥ" aren't liked too much is that they sit in that "grey area" in phonetics - for example, the most common sounds (voicing aside for now) if I remember correctly are /p, t, k, m, n, l/ (with the most common two vowels I think being /a/ and /i/). Now of course Esperanto would be very strange if it was "Etpelanto" (Mi ne pentat ke tio ettat ponan iteo) . Next after those basic stops are the voiced equivalents /b, d, g/, and then basic fricatives /f, s/ (so now we have /p,b,f, t,d,s, k,g, m,n,l/).

This is where we run into problems - if we add a fricative version of "k" (lets call it "H" for now), it is ideally going to be a fricative made in the back of the throat. However, in Esperanto, we have not 1 of these fricatives, but TWO (h, and ĥ, which both map to our ambiguous "H" consonant). I think the problem many speakers report having is that having multiple "H" consonants is confusing, as some think with the s/c issue.

Ideally, it should be /PBF TDS JX:: KGH* MNLR W(V in Esperanto)J/ but clearly it isn't, so ultimately getting rid of the Ĥ is barely helping anything, the whole phonology of the language is fundamentally flawed from a "perfectionist" point of view. So it's not just as simple as making allophonic equivalents. I blame Zamenhoff's somewhat arbitrary approach to Esperanto's vocabulary, but in a way its unavoidable when one of the praEsperantos gets burnt by your dad and you have to restart from scratch . Anyway, the point being that things in this case are very much shrouded in shades of grey and aren't very clear-cut issues to solve :-/

(*with H being allophonically h and ĥ)
(:: this standing for any basic and fairly logical/neutral postalveolar fricative)

I don't think h is the fricative version of k, because it is formed further back in the throat.

Rogir:I don't think h is the fricative version of k, because it is formed further back in the throat.

From a technical point of view, yes (ĥ is the technical fricative version). But, from a laypersons point of view, it's "back in the throat with all those other sounds like K etc" (the precise position isn't what's important here - it's the general area where the sound is being made that's more important). And in, say, English and Japanese, "ĥ" can sometimes be allophonic of "h" (it can also be allophonic of "k" in colloquial English in words like "crackin'" (ck part here) but opening that can of worms up will lead this conversation into one about the Germanic sound shifts ).
Anyway my point was that for many it would be ideal to have sounds in only 3 or 4 "places" in the mouth (let's say "forward-with-tip-of-tongue", "mid-with-tip-of-tongue" and "back-with-middle-or-back-of-tongue" (and then maybe nasals and semivowels)), and to have the range of sounds in any one place simplified and limited so that they can be easily distinguished by the speaker and sometimes listener.
Of course, EO is well past that stage, and getting rid of "ĥ" (or "h" for that matter, who is actually the rogue one here!) is hardly going to solve the rest of people's problems, maybe EO should be treated more as an "educational" international aŭiliary language in that it doesn't have the simplest phonology but it provides a good place to learn some of these sounds.

I don't think Dutch laypeople will agree with you, but yes, they often replace one another.

Rogir:I don't think Dutch laypeople will agree with you, but yes, they often replace one another.

I really think English is the problem here for the most part. There are so many languages out there in which the sounds of H and Ĥ are not considered to be close at all and, in fact, are considered to be quite distinct from each other. In many cases, merely softening a Ĥ to a H sound, as we have done for English, can cause a great deal of confusion in most languages. ARabic is a great example of this, and so is Spanish. I tell my students, never soften your "j" (Ĥ) to an English 'h', as we often soften it so much that it disappears altogether (especially to the ear of a non-native English speaker).

I make them practice the following sentence:
La hija de Juan jamás juega en el jardín.

They get a kick out of it and someone usually gets reported to Homeland Security

I like my Ĥos and I plan to always keep my Ĥos, don't mess with my Ĥos!