I used to say the same thing, but then I was hired at a big company to work on products that needed to handle Arabic, Thai, Devanagari and Bengali. They don't

I used to say the same thing, but then I was hired at a big company to work on products that needed to handle Arabic, Thai, Devanagari and Bengali. They don't have a proper concept of characters and diacritics count as a character, not as an accent so you have verticality in a string! I've come to respect the unicode spec as something with a lot of inherent complexity that you have to understand to work with. Your inner voice will scream "there has to be a better way" all the way through the project, but there actually isn't, you just have to accept that human language and writing is complex and representing it in software is equally complex.