That makes it sound as if UTF-32 would be a silver bullet - it's not. Application code normally has to deal with user-perceived characters/glyphs/grapheme clust

That makes it sound as if UTF-32 would be a silver bullet - it's not. Application code normally has to deal with user-perceived characters/glyphs/grapheme clusters, which means you'll have to treat UTF-32 as variable-length as well. If you want to get back the supposed benefits of UTF-32, you'll have to dynamically assign codepoints to grapheme clusters.