It's not Unicode's fault. Even if we got rid of precompositions there would still be a tremendous amount of complexity in Unicode that all derives from the com

It's not Unicode's fault. Even if we got rid of precompositions there would still be a tremendous amount of complexity in Unicode that all derives from the complexity of the scripts that humans use every day (as well as scripts of dead languages that we choose to support still). That a and ´ and so on are related is a feature of the Latin scripts, and the need/desire to have a coding system that can express that relatedness would exist even if you object to that desire. Almost everything about Unicode that people love to hate comes from humans who have nothing to do with Unicode: - composition (thus multi-codepoint glyphs) - weird collation rules - weird equivalence rules - the need for normalization and/or normalization-insensitive string hashing and comparison Even emoji are like this because emoji are really just a new kind of script (with the extra feature of color, which all other scripts lack). The only complexity that could have been elided would have been pre-compositions and NFC and NFKC, and maybe the K mappings so that NFKD also could be dispensed with. Everything else would still necessarily be a part of Unicode or any competitor to Unicode. And no, lots of codesets, one per-script, does not work as an alternative -- we tried it and it sucks, and that's why Unicode exists. To complain about Unicode's complexity is to tilt at windmills.