Victor, please accept the fact that the codec sub-system in Python
doesn't only have the Unicode implementation as target. It's
true that most codecs were added for the Unicode implementation,
but I deliberately designed the system to be open for other
purposes such as encoding/decoding between different representations
of data as well.

The hex/base64 and compression codecs are example of such
representations, but there are many other uses as well, e.g.
escaping of data in various ways, serialization of objects,
direct conversions between encoded data (à la recode), etc.

Python's history is full of cases where we've opened up its
functionality to new concepts and designs. If you want to propose
to remove the openness in the codec system for some perceived idea
of purity, then you will need to come up with very good arguments -
not only to convince me, but also to convince the Python users
at large :-)

I would much rather like to see the openness of the system used
more in the stdlib and have it developed further to make it easier
to use.