I forget where I read it, but an article claiming the superiority of open source software said something like
Who is most likely to do a good job on Unicode support?
1. An international who needs it
2. A hacker who is interested in that sort of thing
3. A corporate worker who is told he has to support it
The answer, of course, was basically "anything but 3," and I had to agree. I think the same logic applies to this situation. Do you expect PG to do a good job on Unicode when he could care less about it and feels like it's a waste of time? Of course not. The whole point of open sourcing it is to allow someone who would be interested in such an undertaking to go about doing it.
Also, when he said Arc isn't the kind of language for people who would be upset with lack of Unicode support, I mentally appended in a development release of a beta language to the end of that sentence. If PG isn't even guaranteeing a consistent language to build on, how can anyone be upset about lack of Unicode support? Clearly, people are missing the point of the beta release cycle and open source in general.