No amount of extra characters was going to address what Unicode did.
ASCII was not a mistake at all. Adopting it unified what was surely going to be a real mess.
At the time it made sense, and the control functions were needed. Still are.
Control characters were needed for terminals. They never made sense for text. Mixing the two matters is the problem.
What else would you have proposed, or would propose?
No amount of extra characters was going to address what Unicode did.
ASCII was not a mistake at all. Adopting it unified what was surely going to be a real mess.
At the time it made sense, and the control functions were needed. Still are.