>What I find interesting is that while almost every ü can be replaced with ue, not every ue can be replace with ü. Then there is the ß as in Straße or STRASSE. Not every 'ss' can be changed to ß... Too confusing by far! I do remember learning the conversion in German language class when I was living in Germany and I just accepted it for the norm, but obviously that is NOT necessarily true.

Yes, it's a one-way conversion. You can use such a code set reduction as a crutch, but you can't always get your text back to its feet.

For a number of decades we had a problem with the Đ character (d-hyphen), which didn't exist on many typewriters. There was a general agreement that you can type dj instead. This usage has grown to such proportions that many people don't even know that Đ now exists on almost every keyboard. And guess what, there's about a dozen words where you can't convert back - dj is the proper spelling, and đ never existed in those words. Also, the dialectal difference has it that former soft e stays as e in one dialect, becomes je in another, and softens the previous consonant in the third. So "de" may be "dje" or "đe" - but with this đ=dj conversion, you lose the difference between the latter two.

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