> and so stupid hacks like MySQL’s utf8 character set (I seriously don’t know why anyone ever thought it was a good idea in 2002–2004) are now obviously insuffi

> and so stupid hacks like MySQL’s utf8 character set (I seriously don’t know why anyone ever thought it was a good idea in 2002–2004) are now obviously insufficient for full Unicode support If I had to guess, they did it for space and performance reasons so that their benchmark results are a tiny bit better than other RDBMs. They must've figured that their limited utf8 encoding was enough. And they reasoned the immediate benefits on benchmark tests outweighed future considerations. I can't imagine any other reason for not implementing the utf-8 encoding completely and covering the unicode character set in its entirety.