It's actually exactly the same thing. The Han Unification didn't smash together unrelated squiggles that just happened to look similar, they were semantically the same - scholars of the Han writing system spent a bunch of time deciding what is or is not the same squiggle just drawn differently, like Fraktur, and today people are annoyed because, as you'd expect some of them believed that "style of fonts" was integral to the meaning anyway.
Chinese characters represent the Chinese words or parts thereof, Japanese ones represent Japanese words and parts thereof. That is a semantic difference.
So what you're saying is that because 'chat' in English and 'chat' in French are quite different words with very different meanings, you believe there should be a separate letter 'c' for English and French to enable us to tell those words apart?
It is not logographic, but characters still have meaning - associtated phonemes. Although this is less clear in English, it is emphasized in other languages.
And this mapping is different between languages. So 'c' in English has different meaning to 'c' in Czech.
There are differences as well as similarities. I'm no expert, but shouldn't, say, U+4ECA still translate to 'now' no matter if you draw a particular line horizontally or diagonally? There are also some mandatory[1] ligatures in Fraktur unavailable in Unicode. What if I wanted to preserve that distinction in historic writing?
edit:
[1] I think the mandatory ones are actually there (just not in Fraktur), it's some optional ones like ſch that are missing.
> There are differences as well as similarities. I'm no expert, but shouldn't, say, U+4ECA still translate to 'now' no matter if you draw a particular line horizontally or diagonally?
No, since "now" is an English word, not a Japanese or Chinese one.
> There are also some mandatory[1] ligatures in Fraktur unavailable in Unicode.
Unicode doesn't encode ligatures except for backwards compatibility.
Of course it is. Ligatures aren't characters, they're glyphs that represent multiple characters. Unicode does not encode glyphs, that's simply not its job. No more than encoding what font to use or when to render text in italic.
Which is the whole point of Han unification, the argument being that whether or not a particular line in U+4ECA is horizontal or diagonal is just like that. What's the difference?
To the contrary: What any line in any glyph looks like is of no concern because Unicode doesn't deal with glyphs. It deals with abstract characters that don't have appearances to begin with.
"Α" and "A" look exactly the same (at least in most fonts). But each has its own code point because the GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA simply isn't the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A or any other Latin letter.
