Personally I don't see the need for Unicode. The chat already ends up as a complete mess with spam in English (or attempted English) so all adding Unicode would do is allow nabs to spam in more ways that nobody understands and use more bandwidth. Plus the majority of the players use English or languages that don't have their own characters which require Unicode (such as Spanish)
For these and other things VCMP is failing. No offer decent support players. Developers full of themselves with their English. Many have gone to the samp, because this little thing here never throws a decent update. When you finally make your 0.4 already be too late. Almost nobody plays. In as sometimes we have a 50 player in samp have 10,000 or more. Let's face facts and say that these guys make a multiplayer for himself, and not for the players.
Well then hope you have a good time at SA:MP. I personally prefer to be in a community as small as VC:MP since we can know one and another. The only reason you are seeing servers in VC:MP having little players is because Vice City alone is an old game and San Andreas was released like what 2 years after Vice City. Rockstar also made San Andreas with better functions than Vice City/III because they used DirectX 9 while Vice City/III uses DirectX 8. The developers here are trying their very best to give us a stable client and server for us to use in the future. They even rewrote the whole code just for the sake of stability. I heard once that the developers of SA:MP are paid while VC:MP here aren't. In addition to that, I am myself a developer and I have learned how to make games using the DirectX API. I can say this with confidence that making or reverse engineering games aren't that easy as it sounds. Don't believe me, try making a game like Vice City in a month.