The world is a lot more complicated & varied than you think :) I was digging around in some hard drives from 2004 just last weekend. At that time, lots of different encodings were common, especially internationally. Software archaelogy is a common hobby, it could be nice to be able to use a tool like this to search through old filesystems. "Not worth the effort" is definitely a valid response to the feature request, but that also doesn't mean there is absolutely no use for the feature.
I can definitely see a use case for supporting non-UTF-8 pathnames on disk (primarily for archaeological purposes).
In a UTF-8-path-only world, what I would do is have a mount option that says that the pathnames on disk are Latin-1 (so that \xff is mapped to U+00FF in UTF-8, which I'm too lazy to work its exact binary representation right now), and let the people doing archaeology on that write their own tools to remap the resulting mojibake pathnames into more readable ones. Not the cleanest solution, but there are ways to support non-UTF-8 disks even with UTF-8-only pathnames.
Oh yeah I can imagine the pain for drives from that era. I remember reading that sometimes you need the right "codebook" - what was the word - installed and stuff like that.
