I don't know why it is, but Unicode always seems to unnecessarily heat up any discussion involving it. I would really like to know what is causing this: is it a religious issue, does it have to do with the people involved or is Unicode inherently controversial ?
The latter definitely playes a role -- when I was going to IETF meetings back around 94/95, character set issues were always good for a few big fights, and I think the people in Asia are still not all in agreement. Another issue is that adding Unicode was probably the most invasive set of changes ever made to the Python code base. It has complicated many parts of the code, and added at least a proportional share of bugs. (I found 166 source files in CVS containing some variation on the string "unicode", and 110 bug reports mentioning "unicode" in the SF bug tracker.) For a feature that few of the developers ever need to use for themselves (I believe everyone with CVS commit privileges needs at most Latin-1 for their own language :-), I can understand that makes it a touchy issue. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)