While I was a member of the Latin Generation Panel, I write here strictly in my personal and private capacity.

I am concerned that the authors here are operating on several misapprehensions concerning the Latin script and the work of the Latin GP. 

First, there is nothing resembling a “Community of Latin script users.” Indeed, virtually all of the users of any language using the Latin script (baring, perhaps, trained linguists) will be unaware of the existence of most of the other languages using the script. At most, there are small groups of languages which might be considered a community. (For example, perhaps, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, or possibly Spanish and Portuguese.) 

Second, the Latin GP did not, and could not, attempt to evaluate variants as being ”code points which are considered ‘the same’ by the relevant script community.” In addition to the lack of such a community, the members of the Latin GP were simply not in a position to evaluate sameness in the vast majority of languages using the Latin script. The members were all sufficiently fluent in multiple languages be aware of such views by speakers of those languages that we spoke. But those languages constitute a tiny fraction of even the 200+ languages included in determining the repertoire of code point for the script. (Let alone the entire 1,000+ languages which use the script.

For example, French is one of the three language most widely spoken on the planet. Yet none of the members of the Panel happen to be fluent in French. So, in the type case of .QUEBEC, we did not, and could not, “determine” that the code points Latin Small Letter E (e) and Latin Small Letter E With Acute Accent (é) should not be considered variants. We were simply unaware of the potential equivalence in French.

The Latin GP looked primarily at visually indistinguishable pairs of code points, classifying them as blocked variants. A microscopic number of pairs were found to be cases of interchangeable use; i.e. allocatable variants. The primary such case does not actually involve diacritics at all. Rather, it was the use, in German, of Latin Small Letter Sharp S (ß) vs a double S. (Motivated by the fact that two of the members chance to be native speakers of German.) That was also the primary case of a variant being considered allocatable. Otherwise, variants were strictly “visual variants” and therefore blocked.

Given these misunderstandings, I strongly support the single issue PDP to resolve the issue of diacritics in the Latin script. 

Bill Jouris

The Latin GP did not, and could not possibly have, considered the case of code points being variants due to their being "considered the same" by users of one or another of the hundreds of languages using the Latin script. There are simply too many such languages for any small group to be familiar with them all, or even a significant fraction of them. (There certainly is not anything resembling a community of Latin script users.) Therefore, an effort to resolve the issue of interchangeable code points, specifically diacritics, is needed.