Quirky default behavior is *ABSOLUTELY* a problem for experienced engineers… Especially when you can work with DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL and all will have defaults that make sense. In any case, I don’t see why the “utf8” configuration isn’t an alias for “ utf8mb4_bin” at this point… I know there are more options, perhaps you could explain why one of the others you mention, or the actual/flawed default is available other than a legacy decision that was adopted before the spec was finalized? The default/alias should have been updated a long time ago, and has caused real pain. Similar to magic quotes working as a string delimiter, or ansi quotes not working for foreign key reference definitions.