Regarding better UTF-8, I don't think you're reading it the same way I am. Perl has long had the best Unicode support of any of the high level languages. The only changes I saw were an update to the current spec, which is to be expected and has been the norm, and some locale fixes which are welcome but locale is probably still a big global space mess everyone can avoid in code with proper encoding/decoding layers.

So it hasn't been improved exactly. And it's as difficult, unfortunately, as it needs to be.

I only mention this because a lot of the complaints I hear about an admittedly painful part of hacking seem to slight Perl. Perl is a shining handhold in a sea of muck WRT Unicode handling. It's not easy but it is in no way Perl's fault.