> I feel like it's a huge scam and a kind of cultural imperialism from us hacker types to the folks who are late to the party and for whom ASCII++ isn't going to really cut it.
It's more pay-to-play than "cultural imperialism". Arabic does seem to suffer due to no primarily-Arabic country being a member of the consortium (IIRC and it hasn't changed in the last five years). If someone was willing to absorb that cost then they could almost certainly get things done (e.g. look at Japanese).
While the pay-to-play aspect is obviously not utopia, it does seem to work quite well in practice: Arabic does have a large amount of support as is; to get more, you really need to have people who use Arabic as primary members so they can make the hard decisions.
"Hey Arabs, we'll computerize your language if you pay for it or show up otherwise we'll do it anyway, poorly, because it's fun for us and it makes us feel like we're helping. Hope that works for you 'cause it's what you're going to get whether you want it or not."
It's more pay-to-play than "cultural imperialism". Arabic does seem to suffer due to no primarily-Arabic country being a member of the consortium (IIRC and it hasn't changed in the last five years). If someone was willing to absorb that cost then they could almost certainly get things done (e.g. look at Japanese).
While the pay-to-play aspect is obviously not utopia, it does seem to work quite well in practice: Arabic does have a large amount of support as is; to get more, you really need to have people who use Arabic as primary members so they can make the hard decisions.