I agree with you there, I think in the vast majority of applications these days when it comes to text processing simplicity and robustness beats other concerns.

I agree with you there, I think in the vast majority of applications these days when it comes to text processing simplicity and robustness beats other concerns. It's unclear if UTF-32 beats UTF-8 there however. UTF-8's encoding is a bit trickier to deal with of course, but it's really not that bad. On top of that you have a few advantages such as not having to worry about endianess as mentioned previously but also not having to worry too much about alignment or corrupted input (you can re-synchronize UTF-8 at every codepoint since the leading byte has a unique bit pattern). And of course ASCII/C-string compatibility means that it's unlikely to be mangled by non-unicode-aware applications. In any case the complexity probably won't be in the encoding, be it UTF-8, 16, 32 or anything else. UTF-32 might be constand-width codepoint but in general you don't really care about codepoints since they can be combined in various ways to create characters or things like country flags or complex characters with diacritics.