Heck, if I were implementing a CSV parsing module, I'd probably have separate code for the case of single-character separators, quotes, and escapes. Because the reasonable way to implement CSV parsing efficiently is rather different between when "quote" is a single character and when it is more than 1 character.

So I see no problem having a whole separate module for dealing with multi-character quotes. Use the standard module if you don't have to deal with such. Use the other module when you do. Each module is simpler because the multi-character one doesn't have to also try to include code to maximize efficiency for when a quote is a single character.

Do you mean character or byte?

I think you're using "multi-character" when what you actually mean is a single character (i.e., a single Unicode code point) that is encoded using multiple bytes in any one of the Unicode character encoding schemes:  UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE, and UTF-32LE. I don't think you truly mean a user-perceived character that consists of two or more Unicode code points (e.g., g̈ — U+0067 LATIN SMALL LETTER G + U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS).

In my Academy Award Best Picture winners example, every CSV metacharacter is a single character. The field separator character is 🎬 (U+1F3AC CLAPPER BOARD), and both the string delimiter character and the string delimiter escape character are 🎥 (U+1F3A5 MOVIE CAMERA). These two characters are, or course, encoded using multiple bytes in every one of the Unicode character encoding schemes. In UTF-8, they're encoded using four bytes. In UTF-16, they're also encoded using four bytes (two surrogate code points). And in UTF-32, they're encoded using four bytes, naturally.

I'd like to see a truly Unicode-conformant CSV parser/generator module in Perl 5. It would leverage Perl's existing Unicode and character encoding capabilities; it wouldn't roll its own encoding handling. It would parse already-decoded CSV records. The input to the finite-state machine would be Unicode code points, not bytes. (More ambitiously, the input to the FSM might be any arbitrary user-perceived character, or extended grapheme cluster.)

Why not?