Unicode exemplifies the tyranny of committees staffed with people who don't care how much damage they do as they erect their perfectly hypercomplex edifice. It started out nice, hey, let's stop overloading code points in the 256 char range. They quickly add a bunch of characters and things are okay, but then they continue to add more and more obscure alphabets, then they go off the rails are add the "astral" set of characters beyond UTF16, and turn it into an icon database, which changes every year, sure to break on older operating systems. Unicode was not designed to be an art database, yet that is their current intention, with multiple flavors of coloration as they make it more and more ridiculously complicated. I wish they would stop, or at least only revise it once every 10 years like the census.

"Unicode exemplifies the tyranny of committees staffed with people who don't care how much damage they do as they erect their perfectly hypercomplex edifice." Sounds like software development in general :/

Yeah, but of course it's never actually enough to represent all symbols. If you ask me they should have allocated 256 low-numbered code points for a vertical line of 8 "pixels" that you could turn on and off at will. That way you could produce arbitrary icons by outputting a series of those code points.