Applications are made to solve problems, just like programming languages are made to describe problems.

Over the recent months @acmilan have posted heavily on topics like Encoding, Charset, and API compatibility when dealing with anything non-ASCII.

And I did read some of those articles.

To be fair, those articles did address the problem of How to process strings in VisualSomething without fear in every possible case, but did not generally help (and will never) with the problem of How to process strings with least effort and maximum efficiency.