I think there are tradeoffs to each approach, and if it had gone the other way, there would be different problems For example characters for languages would be

I think there are tradeoffs to each approach, and if it had gone the other way, there would be different problems For example characters for languages would be split up between blocks. Among other things this would make collation even more complicated and locale dependent than it already is. And people might complain that it is "western european elitism" that A is in the latin block instead of the greek or cyrrilic block.