I had chatted a little less than a year ago about doing something like this. I finally had some time to sit down and do a little coding to show what I'm thinking of.
The use of the various Text, CharSequence, and byte[] objects is really overcomplicated for most users. It would be nice to have a better API. While we're at it, it seems sense to make it pluggable. This has the advantage of providing backwards compatibility with the current API while still allowing us to tidy up moving forwards. I've opened an issue to document thoughts on this as well as a github pull request to document progress. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ACCUMULO-1551 https://github.com/ekohlwey/accumulo/compare/apache:trunk...ACCUMULO-1551
