This is not a new restriction introduced by Django, it's a very common restriction all over the internet protocols. So maybe we shouldn't try to solve the worlds problems all at once with Django, we still need stuff to do with 2.0 ;-)
I didn't mean to imply that this was a problem Django needed to solve, in any version! The point I was trying to make was that even though the username is restricted to 7bit, you, as a developer, can make the nicer user experience using an extra layer.
--david
