What you're against seems to be bad practices that could be more easily abused with UTF, rather than UTF itself. I think the benefits could outweigh the harms,

What you're against seems to be bad practices that could be more easily abused with UTF, rather than UTF itself. I think the benefits could outweigh the harms, but some of it would indeed depend on good conventions being followed. As for things like é, a function called fianc__e_accent_aigu__e would be far worse, and still a matter of convention. At least search engines could easily be configured to toggle accented letters as unaccented etc. And even nano has pretty good autocomplete facilities these days. Where I find a big benefit with utf names is in reproducing standard mathematical formulae in code. But I agree that this implies a good way to input the required symbols that doesnt require you to search utf charmaps.