Truth be told, how ever people may want to write Afrikaans and Dutch off as the same language, they aren't. As a native Afrikaans speaker I can assure you that Afrikaans is not just a dialect, it is
culturally bonded with its speakers through much hardship. Afrikaans is a "volkstaal"(language of the people). It consists of idiomatic expressions and grammar evolved out of a way of life and thinking.
Afrikaans speakers find it offensive to be called "Dutch" as a lot of us don't even remotely have Dutch heritage. I for instance, am of German descent and French descent.
Languages aren't dead as some people portray them. They're very dynamic. It only took 30 years for Afrikaans to form after the original settlement of Dutch and German people from 1652 onward. Through diaspora dialects also evolved out of Afrikaans after the onset of the Great Trek in 1836. The other issue is that Afrikaans evolved out of
Medieval Dutch, not
Standard Dutch. This means that Afrikaans and Modern Dutch are rather sister languages. The one is not an offspring of the other.
It's therefore near impossible that Afrikaans would ever accept or embrace Dutch spelling or grammar as we are different peoples having different cultures - socially evolving in different manners.
EDIT: Perhaps just to supply the contrast between Dutch and Afrikaans in linguistic terms is to bring up the matter of inflection. Afrikaans is much like English in the sense that it has replaced a lot of its morphological inflection from the proto-Germanic language with pragmatism. This has evolved Afrikaans into an
analytic language(just like English) whereas German and Dutch are thwarted towards a synthetic language model. In more pertinent terms, both Afrikaans and English are considered
fusional languages. One of the biggest traits of a fusional language is it loses inflection over time...and if you look at English and Afrikaans you can clearly see that both lost inflection whilst simultaneously developing into analytic languages.