We have this retro terminology where instead of charset we say encoding. (I understand that encoding has a wider meaning, but we only intend to support encoding/decoding via a charset.) So I think cfg.setDefaultEncoding and <#ftl encoding=...> and such should be renamed to cfg.setDefaultCharset and <#ftl charset=...>.
Also, in the Java API-s we should use Charset instead of a String (java.nio.charset.Charset didn't exist when FM 2.3 was created). -- Thanks, Daniel Dekany