We can't even convince Microsoft, Apple, and everything else Unix based to agree on line endings. How on earth are we going to convince everyone that one character encoding format is the only way they should store their data?

Annoying as it is to deal with, our history as computer scientists demands that we maintain compatibility with older systems and encoding formats that were once used but are now almost forgotten. If we removed all the other encoding formats (code paths that, while underused, still function perfectly fine) we would lose the ability to parse and manipulate a lot of old data.

The universal line ending character is \n. (Except in Microsoft's universe, but that's never been compatible with the rest.)

Not true, most of the plain text protocols like SMTP, FTP, HTTP/1.1 etc. also mandate \r\n.