Agreed. In fact, I'll go farther and say I misspoke, raising the objection you rightly criticize when it would make more sense to object to using UTF-8 to compare english text to chinese text. I have no issues with your comment, though, and I agree that under compression is the correct place to make the comparison. It's faintly aggravating to me that the same text compresses differently according to the intermediate encoding, but that's between me and the universe.

English can be comfortably expressed in 5 bits per character, using 26 letters and the five symbols [. ',"] . Capitalization and numeric digits are nice-to-haves. ;)