[MAL]
I only think that nowadays, the trade-off "more flexibility vs. memory consumption" leans more towards the former than the latter. Not only because memory is cheap, but also because more flexibility tends to result in use of better algorithms and these can lead to better overall performance and lower total memory use.
This tends to sound great - until you have a large app that is consuming too many MBs :) Mozilla's use of strings is fascinating. They have a very complex C++ string API - all aimed at being as space-optimized as possible. They go to huge lengths to avoid string copies and extra allocation at the expense of an API nobody understands :) The point is that for fundamental types (including Unicode), medium size apps may use millions of these objects. Everything we can do to optimize their speed and size is beneficial. Mark.