Unicode. The standard, the consortium, and the people on it. All of it together. It's a festering pile of shit.
But…
Until recently it was the best we had. For whatever reason TRON Encoding never really took off. This left us with a billion other subtly incompatible and immiscible ways of doing mixed-language text that were half-baked and horrible to use. In comes Unicode to the rescue!
But…
Today, twenty-four years after Unicode was first released as a standard it has utterly failed in even covering all the "glyphs" (a typical horrific piece of Unicode jargon) used in major world languages. There are literally millions of people who cannot properly write their names in Unicode's characters. In some languages inappropriate combining must be done to approximate the real glyphs. In others the glyphs don't exist in any form at all, combined or otherwise. This despite seven major revisions (and innumerable minor ones) of the standard.
Along the way we've seen a dozen things like the political and technical stupidity that is the Han Unification. (Know what it is and disagree with why it's stupid? Well, under the logic of the Han Unification, most European languages really belong under a hypothetical Greek Unification because of the massive overlap in both characters and history between Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets. I mean really, what's the difference between A and А or P and Р? There's no reason to separate them! Hell even N and И are clearly variants of the same glyph! Stupid, no? Same applies to Han Unification.)
So... with seven major revisions behind us we still can't write everybody's name even in the major languages. (You don't want to know what being in a minority language group is like!) But with 7.0 we got this festering turd of an addition. On the down side: a few million people can't actually write their names yet. On the up side, however, they can at least express their discontent at this in ways that are disarmingly creative (�, code point 1F4A9, PILE OF POO) and they can be diverse when doing it! Because the hard-working members of the Unicode consortium have been tirelessly slaving to ensure that you can use cutesy icons when communicating, but not on, you know, making it possible to actually write your name!
TL;DR Unicode jumped the shark with 7.0. It's hard to take this shit seriously any longer.
