[eluser]toopay[/eluser]
What i love from CI, is simple. Its speed up my development time so much. I mean, i have experienced using huge number of PHP frameworks (including some of the most weird and bizzare of them), and nothing can compare to it(Kohana might be the closest one). And it have some security helper and system, which help us to write less security procedure. Also it fast.
Every updates or version upgrade, is just make them better on above issues. Also, HMVC built in version 2.x + is good (this maybe clearing out about what you called "application level freedom, design level freedom").
Related with Unicode support, one of the side effect of UTF-8 being a byte-oriented encoding is that so long as you don't want to mess with the contents of a string, you can pass it around blindly using any system that is binary safe(by binary safe, we mean that we can store any byte values in a "string" and will always get exactly the same bytes back). This means (IMO) that PHP 4 and 5 can easily support a unicode application without any character set or encoding support built in into the languange.
But yes, there are some operations that you might need to perform that are imposible without "some kind" of Unicode support. For instance, you can't perform a regular substr() operation, since substr() is a byte-wise operation, and we can't safely cut a UTF-8 encoded string at arbitrary byte boundaries. If you're tempted at this point to move to a fixed-width encoding, such as UCS2, its worth nothing that you still can't blindly cut Unicode strings, even at character boundaries. Because Unicode allows combining characters for diacritical and other marks, a chop between two code points could result in a character at the end of the string missing its accents, or stray accents at the beginning of the string(or strange side effect from double width combining marks, which are too confusing to contemplate here ;-) ).
