I think the point here is that when software calls an encoding "utf8," it is reasonable to expect that it means what every other piece of software is likely to mean by "utf8." MySQL violates that expectation. It's nice that they've changed the default encoding to be "utf8_for_realsies" but that should have been what was meant by the encoding with the name "utf8" all along.
Beyond that, I get that "utf8" meant "utf8...psych" before, but the alias for "utf8" should have been made an alias for the real utf8 several versions ago. And that's just one single quirk... no other RDBMS has so many quirks that weren't eliminated across major versions like mysql.
