Secondly how would the user even know what charset the console is using? Even I only found out programmatically, I think with System.console().charset(). Maybe if I researched I could find out some setting for the Command Prompt.

I may have misunderstood this part of what you were saying. From reading the link you gave, there seems to be some way to dynamically set up properties, I guess by specifying some additional classes. (I'll need to go read it more closely.) But wow, then it becomes a mess.

If I use ConsoleAppender, I expect it by default to use the current charset of the console. I shouldn't have to rewrite a hunk of the logging infrastructure to get that result with tricks and workarounds to get that to work.