It's not really clear to me what "handle better" would be, which is why I asked if Python did anything, as your post suggested it hides some ugliness of Unicode (a claim like this I am always skeptical of, although reading PEP393 it seems kind of clever in that "why don't more libraries do this" kind of way).
I suppose one form of "handle better" would be to always normalize all the time, but then, there are those times when you want payload to be bit-identical after a round-trip. I suspect it's just rooted in Unicode sucking (even if it sucks less than the encodings it replaced); it's funny how Unicode is supposed to make things simpler, but carries its own baggage and complexity and nonsense to worry about. Every time I read about these details in Unicode it seems to suck more than I remembered the last time.
