Victor>It is not a client job to convert encodings.
Of course.
However, there is a vast amount of old PG versions deployed in the wild that send wrong data to clients.
This indeed makes bad user experience, so it is worth doing 2 things:
1) Implement proper solution in further PostgreSQL versions (e.g. include encoding name right into the error message).
2) Implement workaround for current drivers, so clients would get proper error messages even when trying to connect to unpatched server.
Vladimir