Whats wrong with MIME encoding and SMTP? They are simple and they work.
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They're not simple and they work only because we've collectively spent thousands of man-hours making them work.
_Anything_ with in-band metadata is disgusting. This includes crap like "Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?...?=", multipart messages with in-band boundaries, having to do dot-stuffing in SMTP conversations, etc.
Character set encoding for mail headers is unnecessary complicated, but it's a good feature that the MIME type is in-band with the SMTP message. (What is out-of-band and not is a bit ill defined, since there are message headers and SMTP headers. The MIME content type is in the message headers.)
Since mail is a store-and-forward protocol, this guarantees that the content type is stored with the message. Compare it with the web where it makes more sense to keep in the protocol headers, and despite it not being store-and-forward character sets still causes issues with both proxies and page inclusions to this very day.