I agree with you completely on #1. Without built in support, people screw up Unicode. They either won't use it at all, or they won't use it in all the places it's needed, and by the time it becomes a problem, it's a big problem.
On #2, I disagree. The effort required to make the pull request is a small fraction of the effort required to make a library worth adding to Opam. At the same time, it's enough effort that it should prevent the NPM problem of a million stupid "libraries" for 2 line functions.
I'm in the same boat as a lot of people here, in that I think OCaml looks great except for a few big shortcomings that they've ignored for a long time (unicode, multi-threading, etc.) that end up being deal killers for me. As I put it in another thread a while back, it's not even that I need the missing functionality all the time, it's that they refuse to add any of it for as long as possible.