msgpack has native text and binary types, but the default behavior of msgpack.unpackb of the text type is to return the still-encoded bytes, rather than the decoded text (unicode on Python 2, str on Python 3). The msgpack spec specifies that strings are utf-8, so it should be a logical default.

Changing the default value for Unpacker.encoding from None to utf-8 would introduce the desired behavior, but it would be problematic for anyone relying on the default behavior. So I thought I would ask before opening a PR. Would a pull request with this change be accepted?