I've been following these threads with interest, as an uninformed bystander. Michael's unwillingness to unify in haste seems correct in first principles, independent of his expertise and experience. But you have presented the first cogent (to me :-) argument for why delaying the decision is a problem.
Possibly, although it isn't necessarily the job of a proposer to decide in which Unicode range a particular character or set of characters belongs. Extra-alphabetic characters such as marks, punctuation or symbols may be used by multiple scripts, so they don't necessarily belong with a particular script, either one that is already encoded or one that is on the roadmap. What is important for proposers to do is to document how characters are used, including use in multiple scripts or possible variants of potentially unified scripts. You don't need to be certain about where things will end up in order to begin the proposal process: you just have to document the uncertainty.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
What was venerated as style was nothing more than
an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
- Orhan Pamuk, _My name is red_
