BTW -- maybe we should keep the pathological use-case in mind: really short strings. I think we are all thinking in terms of longer strings, maybe a name field, where you might assign 32 bytes or so -- then someone has an accented character in their name, and then ge30 or 31 characters -- no big deal.

I wouldn't call it a pathological use case, it doesn't seem so uncommon to have large datasets of short strings. 

I personally deal with a database of hundreds of billions of 2 to 5 character ASCII strings.  This has been a significant blocker to Python 3 adoption in my world.

BTW, for those new to the list or with a short memory, this topic has been discussed fairly extensively at least 3 times before.  Hopefully the *fourth* time will be the charm!