Comment by cyphar

> But copying how every Chinese dictionary renders characters as trees of simpler characters seems like a much better approach than the arbitrary letter to number mapping of unicode.

Then why does every natively-developed encoding system in a 漢字-using country not do it that way? For one thing, how would you handle the fact that 食反＝飯 but 食耳＝餌 (and the correct rendering depends on the language and locale of the text being rendered)? How about 辵 (aka 辶, ⻍, ⻌)? There are many issues on top of this one, but this is among the most obvious. In the end you would end up with having your encoding format look like Ideographic Description Sequences (which exist in Unicode) but every rendering library would need to have its own lookup table anyway to produce the correct character. Overlaying accents on top of latin characters (in most European languages) is nowhere near as complicated as combining components to form 漢字.

> I can confidently say that native solutions for scripts with accents were _not_ unicode but overstrike.

Unicode supports combining characters for this reason, though there are separate problems with this approach (some characters look almost identical but semantically should be treated differently -- maybe that is something fonts could deal with, but I suspect "Latin Unification" would've gotten more pushback than Han Unification did). If we want computer systems from different languages and cultures to interoperate there are going to be a few rough edges.