TOWUK_ru Flarum already supports MariaDB (although I'm not sure which version is the max) and we use unicode compatible table formats. The requirements listed in the docs are the minimum requirements, not the maximum. If your having issues I recommend opening a support issue in the support tag.
Further when it comes to NORMAL support I've noted that this is not an actual table type or anything of that nature but is rather a table structure format that is 100% theoretical and to be honest makes zero sense for Flarum, especially since you can use joins and unions to call pretty much any data you want. As for the "smaller database" claim the simple matter of the fact is that we don't duplicate the same data everywhere but we rather use relationships (which is basically what normal is in the first place) and the database is really small anyways.
