Ray Dillinger writes:
Many of our text-handling routines are visibly redundant or inelegant in the presence of Unicode. They exist for consistency with an earlier design and are not fully appropriate to a design taking into account the current reality. As such they could and should have been one of the first things we examined when asked to produce a simpler language. These issues could not be addressed under the charter of WG1.
The WG decided by unanimous consent to take no action on this ticket.
They could be and indeed were examined. If I had my druthers, R7RS-small wouldn't have characters at all, only immutable strings (some of them containing just a single code point). See my ballot for a discussion of the difference between the "best possible result" and "the best result possible".