As I understand it Han unification happened because at the time all there was was UCS-2 -no UTF-16, no UTF-8- so codespace was tight and precious, and that motivated codespace preserving optimizations, of which Han unification is the notable one.
To avoid that they needed to have invented UTF-8 many years earlier. Perhaps if the people designing UTF-8 were more diverse they might have felt the necessity to invent UTF-8 to the point of actually doing it, but then perhaps they might have done it poorly. At any rate, I don't know enough details to really know if "Han unification was pushed through by western interests" is remotely fair.
UTF-8 was sketched on a placemat as a response to a different idea. It seems likely that had it not arisen in a moment of inspiration by a genius, we would be stuck with another inferior design by committee.
I agree. But too, necessity is the mother of invention. GP seems to argue that Han unification happened because the UC was not diverse enough. Maybe, and maybe if it had been diverse enough the need would have arisen sooner. But again, the thing they came up with could have been garbage, who knows!
What I do know is that UTF-8 is genius. The Han unification problems seem mostly minor -- I suspect code can detect language and do the right thing, for example, and again, we could revive language tags if need be.
To avoid that they needed to have invented UTF-8 many years earlier. Perhaps if the people designing UTF-8 were more diverse they might have felt the necessity to invent UTF-8 to the point of actually doing it, but then perhaps they might have done it poorly. At any rate, I don't know enough details to really know if "Han unification was pushed through by western interests" is remotely fair.