Type system ftw? As long as it's a blob (unnormalized), it should have a blob type which can do very little besides storing and retrieving, perhaps printing. Only the normalized version should be even comparable.

Why wouldn't blobs be comparable? A blob is just a byte array, and those have fairly natural equality semantics. They're wrong for Unicode strings, sure, but this is akin to complaining about string "1" not being equal to "01".