Don>Starting at the most basic level, is there any good reason not to use utf-8 as the basic encoding standard for everything including plain-text?

BOM or no BOM? 

Unix or Windows style line breaks?

Line breaks meaning paragraph separations or line breaks meaning, well, whatever it is that PG means by line breaks?

“uft-8” meaning that “we” use the interpretation of the code points as defined by Unicode, or meaning “we” invent our own meanings for those code points?