The proposition was that leadingChar might be valuable on the grounds that Unicode doesn't allow you to differentiate Korean/Japanese characters in the same document.
Variation sequences show Unicode has acquired a built-in mechanism for doing just that, so the proposition is false.
The work that would be involved in implementing support for them in paths from User input -> String instance and String -> Glyph display is outside the definition of a String, sure, but work nonetheless.
Maybe I should've put quotes around "fun". :P
One would probably also need to deal with them if implementing Unicode functionality that arguably *is* within String scope btw, such as equality, collation and normalization.
Just because Strings currently treat code point = character, doesn't make it 100% correct :)
Cheers,
Henry