Thank you very much for this explanation.
Regarding the version: Our O/S usually is Debian which generally uses software which is quite old. This means that I will have to compile MariaDB myself in every case. The current project where this new collations are needed will probably take about three months before being finished. It would be very nice if we could have the new collations until then. In the meantime, we'll continue development with MySQL and switch to MariaDB as soon as the new collations are available.
_ci collations would be sufficient as a starting point. Nevertheless, I think there must be a _nopad_ collation for every collation which already exists. Personally, since we are using utf8 (and no other encoding) in every part of every project, I would prefer to have *all utf8* _nopad_ collations before having any other _nopad_ collation. But that's just my personal opinion. We will be grateful for any progress regardless of the order of things being implemented.
I just noticed that my MUA underlined tow lines of my text completely, and I would like to apologize for that. I really did not not want to shout ... The underlining obviously happens because I used some underscores in my text ...