Yes, it's not an ideal solution on many respects. I kind of get why we got here, as encodings were a quagmire for a long time, and coming to a real clean, ever

Yes, it's not an ideal solution on many respects. I kind of get why we got here, as encodings were a quagmire for a long time, and coming to a real clean, everybody's happy solution with unicode looked completely unrealistic. We now have way better compatibility, got to settle for one encoding in most cases, and the annoyances are for now somewhat manageable (if/when China opens more to the global net, it might be a different story). Installing fonts is still easier than adding encoding compatibilities.