I don't think the solution to this problem is to make our string classes more complicated. I think it's to make our languages and character sets less complicated. I can't believe that multiple codepoints being used to generate a single glyph made it into the Unicode spec. That breaks a bunch of extremely useful abstractions. I think it is reasonable to expect human languages to be made up of distinct glypths that do not interfere with each other. Any language that does not is too complicated to be worth supporting. Let it die.
