But comparing something to something else and it being easy, doesn't make it easy by itself.

Paraphrasing the joke about new standards: we had a problem, so we created a beatiful abstraction. Now we have more problems. One of the new problem being normalization.

It doesn't undermine the good that Unicode brought, but you can't say to have included some unilib.h and use its functions without understanding all the Unicode quirks and its encodings, because some of the parameters wouldn't even make sense to you, like the same normalization forms.