Eh, I dunno. I understand very well the wisdom of keeping with the known, but there is such a thing as a dead horse. Maybe, in a theoretical sense, a sufficient amount of beating might grant you a zombie horse; in which case you should still mind your brain very, very carefully, lest you it ends up eaten, or worse, corrupted into thinking that mb_* variants of string functions can ever, ever be a substitute for a true Unicode type.