[PeterisP]

As soon you want to mention names of people, English text often requires Unicode characters. Looking up some examples, the first random paper I took from arxiv mentioned three surnames that needed Unicode, the second needed four, including the name of one of authors herself.

Even if you're talking purely about people in USA - for example, a page of MIT faculty https://www.eecs.mit.edu/people/faculty-advisors includes names like Jesús, Corbató and Tomás.

[badsectoracula]

Doesn't TeX already handle that? A quick search shows http://vjimc.osu.cz/TeXform.html

FWIW my own name would need Unicode too (Κώστας Μιχαλόπουλος) but i always use its romanized form (Kostas Michalopoulos) in English. I think that is common when writing English text and names from languages that do not use the latin (or derived) alphabet.

[TheRealPomax]

An answer here would be way too long, but the short answer is "no". The technologies that were available at the time of TeX meant that TeX had to do all kinds of things that in today's world are bizarre.

TeX has seen a lot of improvements over the last 30 years, and modern TeX engines such as XeTeX and LuaTex have removed a lot of the insane painpoints that came with traditional TeX, which worked well only because there was literally nothing better at the time.

A modern TeX engine will let you just write what you want to write, using all of Unicode as your playground, using modern OpenType fonts, and with real vector graphics. None of those things can be done with original TeX, not just "it's hard to", it's literally impossible without rewriting it from the ground up. Which is why we HAVE modern TeX engines: just because it worked, doesn't mean it was good. It was merely the best available at the time.

Time moved on.