[bruce343434]

What makes this worse is that some Cyrillic characters like the Cyrillic "а" have a different code point from the Latin "a" despite looking _exactly_ identical. So unicode isn't even consistent with their unification logic.

[demetrius]

I believe Cyrillic а and Latin а are different because there already existed legacy encodings where а and а were considered different characters, so Unicode kept the distinction for backward-compatibility.

While there were no existing legacy encodings allowing to write Chinese and Japanese at the same time, so there was nothing to keep compatibility with.