I have heard two different things about Unicode:

1. It is the One True Character Set, and the answer to all our problems, or at least the ones having to do with text encoding. Advocates of this position usually have a specific format that they prefer - UTF8 or UCS2.
2. It is an abomination in the sight of God, and must be stamped out wherever it occurs. The usual reason given is that it's not a strict superset of all existing encodings. E.g. the conversion from various Chinese/Japanese charsets to Unicode and back is said to lose information.

The truth, as usual, will be somewhere in the middle. I don't know enough about the issues to judge. I would appreciate it if anyone who does know enough to judge would contact me and give me some clues. Email: zack@wolery.cumb.org.