I agree with your general sentiment that the right direction to move now
is towards simplification rather than increased complexity. But if we
go too far in that direction, we will fail to meet some important needs
of substantial numbers of people, e.g. those who want smoother support
for alternate character sets.
The original scheme of Content-Type and Content-Encoding had the virtue of
simplicity, plus a graceful fallback to the existing environment. If
correspondents agree on Content-Type, then any symbol set they choose is
available to them. Aren't these the principle goals of RFC-XXXX?
Additionally, it'll work regardless of whether an 8-bit channel or a 7-bit
channel is used to transport the message.
I watched despairingly over the last two weeks as these simple virtues were
forgotten.
-jwn2