[fulafel]

My misunderstanding seemed to be that "accent-insensitive" turns out to be a precise technical term from MySQL that says "just sort UTF-8 using the American locale and collation, but pretend accented characters are equal to their non-accented versions" which is not a standard collation order in any locale.

[berns]

I think this is incorrect. In Mysql utf8_spanish_ci and utf8_swedish_ci have different accent rules, for example.

[fulafel]

But then what would be the case for using accent-ignoring spanish collation rules, rather than the default spanish collation rules that sort accented chars according to normal spanish sorting? This sounds strictly inferior in any human facing application.