[derleth]

The point is that the typical rules in one language are completely bizarre in another. Unicode tries hard to be at least minimally useful to everyone, meaning that it has to make allowances for all of the rules.

It's complicated. It's more complicated than any encoding standard that came before. It's also the most broadly useful, and the first standard to really take into account the complexities of human written language, as opposed to just one region's written language.