[happytoexplain]

As a developer who's been working intimately with user-facing strings for years, I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. Unicode is one of the borderline zero standards that is almost angelic in its purity, with only an extremely few things I think might have served better if done differently.

[kazinator]

> As a developer who's been working intimately with user-facing strings for years, ...

User-facing is easy; things go downhill when users have system-facing strings of their own, and some of those strings become other-user-facing strings.

> with only an extremely few things I think might have served better if done differently.

Thus, in spite of disagreeing in the strongest possible terms, you do have some nits to pick.

A "few things" could be far-reaching. For instance, allowing the same semantic character to be encoded in more than one way can count as "one thing". If someone happens to think this is the only problem with Unicode, then that's "extremely few things". Yet, it's pretty major.

[jrochkind1]

Your idea that either there are NO "nits to pick" (things that could have been done better in a standard, complete perfection), OR it means that the standards-makers "decided to make it complicated to bolster their egos" -- is ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

[kazinator]

My point isn't that there must be no nits to pick, but that look, even a self-proclaimed Unicode cheerleader who disagrees with me in the "strongest possible" terms still finds it necessary to mention that he or she has some.