Unicode is still _way_ less hard than anything else for manipulating text. Global human written language is complicated, unicode is a pretty ingeniously designed standard, it's got solutions that work pretty darn well for almost any common manipulation you'd want to do. Now, everything isn't always implemented or easily accessible on every platform, and people don't always understand what to do with it -- because global human written language is complicated -- but unicode is a pretty amazing accomplishment, quite successful in various meanings of 'succesful'.