Why would par2 need to handle anything related to encoding? It's acting on the data independently of the actual contents of the data. I'd agree about the tool

Why would par2 need to handle anything related to encoding? It's acting on the data independently of the actual contents of the data. I'd agree about the tooling problems with it, it's "acceptable" on a linux/unix command line but I've never seen anything elsewhere that even looked halfway usable.