The language of Beowulf is far enough from ours that I need to do a lot of studying before I can read it anyway, so the additional effort to learn a script wouldn't make much of a difference. If, for instance, Shakespeare was in a different script, it would certainly cut down on the number of people who read Shakespeare (unless translated versions became widely available, which is possible for Shakespeare, but would not be true for most old works.)

Furthermore, doing such reform now would mean doing it after cheap mass market printing, which would make the effect much worse (and unlike Shakespeare, the works would be copyrighted, so if the owner refuses to publish a translated version, nobody else could). I don't know how many mass market books there were in Turkey in the 1920's.