Your expectation is common among westerners. It typically goes away within a few days of beginning to work with large amounts of CJK content.
When someone says they accept UTF-8, UCS-2, or any other encoding, my first question is always "Are characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane supported?". There is a long history quite apart from MySQL of the answer to that question being "no", particularly if the project in question originated in the 90s (or even early 2000s).
When someone says they accept UTF-8, UCS-2, or any other encoding, my first question is always "Are characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane supported?". There is a long history quite apart from MySQL of the answer to that question being "no", particularly if the project in question originated in the 90s (or even early 2000s).