> Having to work with 2 bytes languages (CJK typically) without proper Unicode support is much more of a hassle.

Proper unicode support is not even close to being a priority when it comes to dealing with Japanese text. No one would store important Japanese text in unicode. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Unihan_.22abstr...

One size doesn't fit all.

This makes me wonder about Ruby, whose creator is Japanese and Japanese is certainly not a language whose characters can be expressed in a single byte. Is Ruby better than Python for complex encodings? If so has it always been this way, or did Matz just deal with it in the early days?

Yes, Ruby has long had decent (i.e. comparable to Python 3) encoding support. But in the early days not much was made of this, perhaps because Rails was the driving force behind Ruby adoption in the west and Rails' encoding support was much worse than what Ruby could do.