Regarding the title -- anecdotally, everyone I know is sacred of encoding issues, and I don't know anyone who claims they have a great understanding of Unicode

Regarding the title -- anecdotally, everyone I know is sacred of encoding issues, and I don't know anyone who claims they have a great understanding of Unicode or think it is easy (including myself). It is often overlooked for sure -- people don't realize there is a problem in the code until they run into a bug, ane it turns out they are treating strings wrong from the very beginning.