I agree with you. TR36 is outright terrifying. I might feel more comfortable if the recommendations were already baked into foundational libraries like libicu

I agree with you. TR36 is outright terrifying. I might feel more comfortable if the recommendations were already baked into foundational libraries like libicu, but they aren't. Its as if I'm wading into a world with as many footguns and silent killers as C's undefined behavior rules. In C we've spent decades developing tools to help detect and mitigate the problems and they are still regularly exploited. Unicode only has widely-available mitigation tools for a handful of the easiest problems to solve. C's flaws lead to the development of several different competing programming languages. Various flaws in cryptography lead to the development of algorithms that achieve the same result, but have far fewer implementation gotchas. IMO, the time has come for the development of a truly strict variant of Unicode that still supports the primary objective, but learns from Unicode's mistakes.