What bugs me is not the mis-encoding (though that's a fail), but that people "struggled to understand" it... surely everyone's seen apostrophes turn into these special characters on enough web pages over the past ten years to have recognized what's happening when it does.
Blame Hollywood. Non-tech folks have been conditioned to panic whenever anything out of the ordinary appears on screen, because that's how Hollywood visualizes computer viruses and alien space invaders.
