It is unfortunate this choice was made, but a of scripts assume the current character sets, and such a change would likely cause horrors of lovecraftian proportions.

I can kind of understand the restriction in the case of prim names… Though I suspect it was out of necessary concern. Though why the description was limited in such a way to begin with, is certainly a mystery — most likely simple laziness. (That and getting DB's to handle unicode cleanly has in the past been remarkably problematic.)

Also, who says it's American? They could have chosen British just to be difficult, for all you know. You Americans, thinking you're the centre of all reality. Sheesh.