It should be noted that the released version of Arc actually did support Unicode. The only reason that it became a controversy was because PG said it was ASCII-only and implied it was a design decision. It is purely a communication issue.

(Btw. same thing with the controversy over presentational markup vs CSS. AFAICT the Arc framework don't do any layout at all out of the box, including any presentational markup.)

Now PG seem to believe that controversy is inevitable when creating a new language so you might as well throw a few random punches. However if you want to build a vibrant community around a language I think it is very important to choose you battles carefully and your swipes wisely.