Alphabets arent even the only way to go. Languages like Hindi, Khmer, Lao, Thai, Tibetan, Ethiopic (Ge'ez and to a lesser extent Amharic), Cree, and Sanskrit use Abugidas where a set of consonants is embellished with vowell sounds, which do not stand as letters in there own right. Arabic and Hebrew exist on the edge of this category, since they are alphabets with vowells playing a backup role--they cannot stand as letters by themselves, but are often dropped all together since the three letter root system of semitic languages allows any fluent reader to guess/assume which vowells fill in the word based on the consonants and context.
Then there are also syllabaries-- sets of symbols where consonants and vowells do not exist as separate letters, but only as combined syllables. I.e. there is no letter k and letter a, only the syllable ka, to g and o, only go. Cherokee uses such a system. Reading and Writing Japanese is a balancing act between three different writing systems (not to mention roman letters and arabic numerals)-- two are syllabaries, (the order of japanese syllabaries, but not the symbols are based on an abugida called Shiddam Script which was imported with Buddhist Sutras via China.) one for japanese words and their conjugations, and one for foreign words and onomatopoeia (bang! wham! the sound of walking up stairs, or of rice being soft and squishy), along with the kanji-- chinese logograms which have between 1 and 5 different pronunciations depending on the context. For example 日 means day or sun, but has several different pronunciations. In 日立--Hitachi, the name of the Japanese company, it is pronounced 'hi', which is pretty standard, but in 日曜日 (Sunday, Nichiyoubi) it is pronounced two different ways in the same word. Nichi, meaning sun (related to the Ni of Nihon (日本) i.e. Japan, Sun Source, or land of the rising sun) and bi, the voiced form of hi. In 今日, which means today, 日 is combined with the charachter for now (normally pronounced ima) to make kyou-- a pronunciation which has little to do with either charachter independantly.
Chinese, as far as i know, limits their charachters to one pronunciation each, but since each one of the thousands of characters is usually monosyllabic they have tones (which arent represented in the charachters themselves, at least not in their modern incarnations) to differentiate them. 4 tones in mandarin, and 6 in cantonese.
I don't know exactly how you would define Hangul, the korean writing system but it is (by design) one of the most efficient and easy to learn systems in the world. Individual symbols act like letters which are then arranged into syllable blocks. So, for example, the phonemes k, i, and m each have a representative symbol-- ㄱ, ㅣ, and ㅁ, respectively, which are then combined into the syllable kim 김, the most common korean family name, or the first half of kimchi 김치 where the i phoneme makes another appearance.
What im trying to say is the possibilities are endless, and that while the ipa may be a good jumping off point for realizing just how many 'r' noises there are, or what parts of our vocal tract we never even touch with english, its far to large and unwieldy to function as a day to day system of transcription. The only people who use the full range of sounds available to a human being are babies when they babble, and that range is slowly narrowed into the phonemes neccesary for the childs first language. New phonemes can of course be (re)learned, but each language has a bounded set which it uses. English therefore doesnt need a letter for the arabic qaf, or the Clicks of Khoisan languages. It all comes down to the phonetic needs of Maraxxian, or any other real or invented language.
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