Thank you for the thorough and practical write-up.

About the only thing I would add to it is i18n concerns.

A few quick ones off of the top of my head:

  - Words are separated by whitespace or dashes.
  - Customers only ever enter ASCII.
  - Customers only ever enter accented characters with/without accents.
  - A "Unicode-capable" system will happily take in any valid unicode.
  - A "Unicode-capable" system will pass through any valid unicode undisturbed.
  - Software systems perform Unicode normalization.
  - WinNT API is UTF-16.
  - There is 1-to-1 mapping between uppercase and lowercase.
  - Unicode collation algorithm is optimal for every single language.
  - Unicode collation algorithm is optimal for multi-language document sets.
  - Distinguishing/coalescing plural and singular forms of words is easy.
  - There are separate plural/singular forms of words.
  - Words have stem and optional suffixes, but not prefixes.
  - Soundex etc. works for every language.