The justification Unicode gives is that the national standards body in the PRC made distinct code points for the two variations of the first character /, whereas Korea never made separate code points for the different variants of . There is a reason for this that has nothing to do with how the domestic bodies view the characters themselves. China went through a process in the twentieth century that changed (if not simplified) several characters. During this transition, there was a need to be able to encode both variants within the same document. Korean has always used the variant of with the (U+5165) radical on top. Therefore, it had no reason to encode both variants. Korean language documents made in the twentieth century had little reason to represent both versions in the same document.
