I know the technical limitations, and I just think the audience would be more tolerant. Maybe it's with the hindsight of 100 years of cinema that I have the luxury of knowing that people would be OK with bad dubs (Hello kung-fu movies) and that they could have played the film back and had a recording booth for the actors to "ADR" their lines into a clean recording. Today we have millions of dollars budget. In the 20s and 30s that would have been so outside the realm of possibility that it was more effective to get it done silently.

So while there were possibly technical solutions that would have worked, they would likely have priced out every movie studio.

For me, I look at some of Chaplin's films from the early 30s and wish he wasn't so stubborn to adopt the technology to sync the audio to the visual, since it was otherwise being adopted.