Most people seem to program applications and not algorithms, which seems to be tha case, otherwise they would recognize the spirit/intention of Arc to actually make writting programs shorter.
I suppose this is not in the priorities of other people, whereas building an application it is, therefore their need for Unicode. But I suppose this is covered by the fact as stated by you Paul, that Arc is not for everyone.
It would be interesting to see perfomance charts and implementation of data structures to see any benefits.
