Yes, I mentioned that I’m aware of the stance of the Unicode Consortium, and if the verdict of the community is to follow that recommendation, then so be it. What I want to know is precisely that veredict.
And those characters are not deprecated: They exist permanently in the specification and have at least one recomended, current use by the Unicode Consortium (to keep the glyph in one row in vertical text), not to mention they are supported for the mayority of unicode fonts.
Regarding to the difficulty in the edit process: This can be said of various similar cases, such as the hyphen (-,‐), the non-breaking space (for French punctuation), or even the endash. Yet, it is recommended to do this changes if one is able to. Furthermore, in various cases this is easly discernible by selecting them (it will be obvious wether they are two I or one Ⅱ).
If I had to rephrase my question, it would be: If I made such changes, will they be seen as an improvement to the database? Will it depend on the personal preference of those who see and vote on the edit, or will we have a note in the styleguide to quickly resolve the matter?
My personal opinion is that they would be an improvement, for the reasons that I have mentioned; and I have not seen a reason not to consider them as such (other that they are deprecated, which they are not).
Of course, the stance of the Unicode Consortium is a big point to consider. It’s a shame that they not provide a reasoning for it, so it can be discussed beyond the authority point.
But other than that, I don’t see why wouldn’t we encourage the use of a semantically and stylistically better option (of course, that Picard could convert those character to ASCII if that option is marked would be important in this).