Leaving aside the fact that encoding support is explicitly a goal, it would be an incredibly daft thing to do to decide that Rubinius was going to take a regres

Leaving aside the fact that encoding support is explicitly a goal, it would be an incredibly daft thing to do to decide that Rubinius was going to take a regressive, all-the-world-is-one-encoding point of view and break compatibility with much existing Ruby code.