I agree with Forrest here. The complaints being lodged against the
results of our work are not new. We've been struggling with all these
issues for quite some time ourselves, and we voted this way having
already having been told many times that the IESG as well as the email
folks wanted encoding over moving towards UTF-8 in headers.
It's not like encoding is a magic fix. If it were, it would have been
an easy decision and it would have been made two years ago. The issues
against encoding go beyond the fact that the standards and
implementations are highly flawed.
I've asked paf to step in and help out.
--Dave