I recall doing a quick assessment of the UTF encodings recently and coming to a similar conclusion: UTF-8 is nearly ideal for transmission and storage and is f

I recall doing a quick assessment of the UTF encodings recently and coming to a similar conclusion: UTF-8 is nearly ideal for transmission and storage and is fairly robust for manipulation, albeit it can be the least straightforward to implement(not that app developers actually have to implement it). UTF-32 is probably most useful as an internal optimization for tasks that can really benefit from a straight scan/cut/paste over even-sized memory cells. You wouldn't store it in your database, but you might want to make use of it in a document editor, for example, to speed up search+replace type operations. UTF-16 is still substantially more heavyweight than UTF-8, but it can't be optimized into straight memory cells like UTF-32 without breaking the spec. So - unless your needs are extremely specific and you discover a sweet spot in UTF-16 after extensive profiling - it's just not a likely candidate.