All you need to know about unicode, is that they thought they could "unify" all the asian glyphs into one alphabet.

That said, given the origins of writing, I dont think there are any much cleaner solutions.

Their biggest mistake is probably not insisting on a mandatory vector representation which could be used to generate a "font-of-last-resort"

My personal pet-peeve is that unicode have not yet assigned 128 code points and two modifiers to cove all possible combinations of 7-segment LEDs :-)