I don't like it at all.
1) It is a huge breakage and you have been refusing to do one
even for more important problems. What is about this sudden
change of mind?
2) It is regression back to C++ days of
no-one-cares-about-Unicode pain. Thinking about strings as
character arrays is so natural and convenient that if
language/Phobos won't punish you for that, it will be extremely
widespread.
Rendering correctness is very application-specific but providing
basic guarantees that string is not completely broken is useful.
Now real problems I see:
1) stuff like readText() returns char[] instead of requiring
explicit default encoding
2) lack of convenient .raw property which will effectively do
cast(ubyte[])
3) the fact that std.string always assumes unicode and never
forwards to std.ascii for
http://dlang.org/phobos/std_encoding.html#.AsciiString / ubyte[]
