So, a highly limited Latin only encoding seems modern/uncrufty to you in 2012?

The Windows‑1252 character set isn't "highly limited." I'm an English-speaking monoglot—or, more to the point, an English-writing monoglot—so I can use the Windows‑1252 character set for all my writing. And I can likely continue to use it for a very long time, either until I learn another language that uses a writing system other than Latin, or until I drop dead. Saying Windows‑1252 is highly limited because it can't be used to write Chinese or Hebrew is like saying my Toyota Corolla is highly limited because it can't fly in the sky or sail the seas.

The Windows‑1252 and ISO 8859‑1 (Latin 1) character sets are still very commonly used today for digital text. For example, in my industry, e-discovery and litigation support in the United States, text and data are much more often Windows‑1252 than Unicode (UTF‑8). This is just how it is.

So, no, Windows‑1252 and Latin 1 don't seem especially unmodern or crufty to me. They're just older, single-byte encodings, not Unicode, that's all.

By the way, I'm a proponent of Unicode and I support and encourage its adoption. I'm a member of the Unicode Consortium. My name is proudly displayed on its Members page. ☺ (I confess I'm not an active member; I just pay to belong.) I've attended several Unicode Conferences and have had the good fortune to rub elbows with the Unicode cognescenti. My keen interest in Unicode dovetails nicely with my love of Perl, whose Unicode support is excellent.

Jim