as an armchair linguist it is clearly two (not one, not three) distinct "characters", by going how I am guessing native speakers think about them. If all three

as an armchair linguist it is clearly two (not one, not three) distinct "characters", by going how I am guessing native speakers think about them. If all three had different codepoints and you replaced 国 with 國 a lot of people would realize, less so if you replaced 國 with 國. To my understanding the only argument in favour for han unification was that it would have taken-up a lot of codepoints otherwise.