The feature set of the Linux VT console has been intentionally limited from nearly the start, and the line has always been: if you need more than this, do it in userspace. There has been several projects which have, for example kon2 which provided CJK functionality -- not something that one can sanely do in the kernel because of font size; similarly, Arabic/Indic font shaping is just plain too painful.
For most people, the solution has simply been to bootstrap out of the console as quickly as possible, most of the time never even showing the console. What you find pretty quickly is that if you want something that is fully featured you end up with something that is as complex as X or Wayland anyway, and then you might as well go straight there.
The in-kernel console will remain, of course, as an ultimate fallback. If someone wants to give users more options, more power to them.