I've only been on this list for some months, and I only came to it with my own little project in mind, but it occurs to me, as I follow all these threads, that Unicode might benefit from a more flexible process of adaptation, of Unicodification. The model would be an asymptotic approach to standardization that tolerated an amount of change in inverse proportion to time elapsed.
In other words, people could propose a new script or character and rather than have it discussed before encoding and then encoded in permanence, with no possibility even to correct obvious errors as in U+FE18, instead it would be provisionally accepted but still subject to modifications as implementors worked with it. Hopefully, most mistakes would be unearthed early and corrections applied before much text had been encoded. As time passed and the encoding became more stable, the size of mistake open to correction would be reduced, e.g. to spelling errors, until it was frozen as a result of this process before being declared permanent. My thought is that some of the problems that I've seen discussed might have been discovered and addressed had a community been using the proposed standard before it became immutable. In the current process, that transition may occur too early to be useful. It may be easier to fix all the existing text if very little time has passed, than to "fix" all future text forever. This idea could also be extended to new characters and scripts that might or might not make it into Unicode : Unicode could offer a provisional acceptance that allowed users to demonstrate the utility of the proposed changes once they're in Unicode, even if they're later modified or withdrawn. This policy might have prevented the recoding of Tengwar, Cirth, Shavian, Phaistos Disc and Deseret as they moved from the PUA to the SMP. It seems to me that the current policy is intended to offer implementors a guarantee of our best effort to save them the trouble of chasing down problems, but in fact they might prefer to have some problems fixed early (while the developers still remember the application) than to have to take unfixed problems into account forever. This idea is WAY beyond my expertise, but I thought I'd mention it for you all to consider.
