Calm down.
Wims was trying to explain that [] characters are technically not allowed in URLs and instead should be 'encoded' (i.e., escaped) as described here:
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm . He's not talking about codepages or UTF encoding at all. I think his point was just to explain this might have been the rationale behind how it works now.
That said, since some web browsers let you use those characters in URLs anyway, it might be worth looking into.
The fact that the URL catcher does not behave the same way as hotlinks is probably a bug. It's a bit much to call it "horribly broken" though.
I'm going to disregard the codepage discussion since it's not related, but if you really want to discuss it, keep in mind it's pretty much already been rehashed many times before.
