In 1995 what you describe isn't crazy. Who knows if this "Unicode" will go anywhere.

In 2005 it's rather old-fashioned. There's lots of 8859-1 and cp1252 out there but people aren't making so much of it, and Unicode aka 10646 is clearly the future.

In 2015 it's a done deal.

Here we are in 2025. Stop treating non-Unicode text as anything other than an aberration.

You don't need checks "for every string operation". You need a properly designed string type.