It has a bad case of featuritis; it reads both discursively and self-consciously, like it knows that there's really no justification for using regexps to specif

It has a bad case of featuritis; it reads both discursively and self-consciously, like it knows that there's really no justification for using regexps to specify named properties, but it just can't help itself. Some of the Level 3 features venture too far afield from Unicode, too, e.g., 3.11 is "implement YACC" and has nothing to do with Unicode and 3.7 is "implement a streaming regexp engine, we dare you" (challenge accepted, Unicode dweebs!). So, it is a horrible standard by which to judge overall conformance, but no one really does that. I think the value is in lighting the way through a broad array of thorny Unicode topics. And I think that the implementor who grapples with a majority subset of the sensible topics will wind up with an engine that handles users' Unicode needs.