Hi, ursAxZA. Yes, you're describing an "elision," which is where speakers drop or blur sounds together to make speech more fluid, like the way some people say, "Sup?" when they mean, "What's up?" or replace the T with a glottal stop in the word "mountain," as they do in Utah.

I wholeheartedly agree that it is fine to write things like "Sup?" when appropriate, such as dialogue in a novel. You see this all the time in Japanese TV, books, magazines, manga, etc. However, I disagree that elisions should dictate how we spell words in regular written communication, especially when discussing a tool meant to help non-native Japanese speakers learn the language. And as the parent poster pointed out, when singing, you would sing "se n se i" rather than "se n se e." The same is true of haiku and other instances where the morae (linguistic beats similar to syllables in English) are clearly enunciated.

As I said, sensei is technically four morae and different than "sensē," and, in my opinion, should remain that way in Romaji, it being a writing system and one method for inputting Japanese text.

Thanks for the respectful conversation. I appreciate the points you brought up.