> That said, "convert everything to your native Unicode format at the edges and reconvert it back out at the edges" is at least a tolerable answer.
It obviously isn't for the ruby developers. If it were so they had chosen utf8 as internal encoding, which they didn't because they didn't consider this a tolerable answer. Even though you can get ruby 1.9 to work this way, this approach could still cause some headache.
I was addressing the complaint that the encoding in Ruby is hard now, and it broke working code. Encoding is fundamentally hard, and if encoding used to be easy it is almost certainly because your old code got it wrong, and your old code probably wasn't working. I emphasize the "probably" because it is faintly possible that your old code really did work and now it really doesn't work, in which case I would understand the frustration, but if I were giving odds on the chance that the old code actually handled everything correctly I'd open the bidding at somewhere around 5:1 for a superstar encoding expert (working in a language with poor encoding labelling support), with the odds getting worse the further from that you get. There are some things that are just hard without language support even for experts.