My experience was that brittleness around text encoding in Emacs (versions 22 and 23 or so) was a constant source of annoyance for years.
IIRC, the main way this brittleness bit me was that every time a buffer containing a non-ASCII character was saved, Emacs would engage me in a conversation (which I found tedious and distracting) about what coding system I would like to use to save the file, and I never found a sane way to configure it to avoid such conversations even after spending hours learning about how Emacs does coding systems: I simply had to wait (a year or 3) for a new version of Emacs in which the code for saving buffers worked better.
I think some people like engaging in these conversations with their computers even though the conversations are very boring and repetitive and that such conversation-likers are numerous among Emacs users or at least Emacs maintainers.
TBH Gvim and most editors did the same on saving prompts, but for sure you could edit that under Emacs with M-x configure, and Emacs supported weirdly encoded files on the spot.
