🚀 go-pugleaf

>A simple compromise would be to add the commonly used ligatures to
>Unicode....

In fact, they are there. 

Further, as of this summer, it has been agreed that Unicdoe itself
is to be a subset of ECMA 10646, which opens up a lot of extra
characters.

I think you are confusing the historical (and, granted, typographically
brain dead and otherwise excreble) factors that led to ASCII and ANSI,
and presuming that this defines a generally acceptable norm even for
English use of Latin 1. Such does not appear to be the case. It
might be illuminating to peruse the Unicode volume (only volume 1 has
been released, to my knowledge, containing everything but the 
voluminous Korean-Chinese-Japanese glyphs) and discussion.

Apple's proposed line layout manager =will= provide a consistent, and
on the Mac, standard way of handling the contradiction between character
and glyph. Microsoft has announced similar intentions for future versions
of Windows, and Windows NT.