Accent folding can be OK if you are dealing with a small number of characters. If you try to do that with multiple alphabets, you are re-creating the Unicode character encoding system. It may not be worth your time to re-invent that plumbing. UTF-8 is a universal encoding. It can be a complicated, multi-step process to get some databases configured to UTF-8. Also, everything in all your software has to be UTF-8 configured.
FWIW