[Avernar]

> But when you get right down to it, what I do for a living is write web applications,

That is my use case for Python as well.

> sometimes I have to write validation that cares about length,

That's where a trucation function that understands grapheme clusters whould come in so handy. Tell it that you want to truncate to n bytes maximum and let it chop a bit more as to not split a grapheme cluster.

Fortunately my database does not have fixed with strings so I rarely bump into this one.

> or about finding specific things in specific positions, and so indexing into a string is something I have do to from time to time

I write my code to avoid this. Yes I still have to use an index because that's what Python supports but it would be trivial to convert it to another language that supports string iterators.