Quote Originally Posted by JRGoold View Post
It’s purely a personal bias, but I dislike using funny fonts to display special characters — it always seems like a bit of a kludge.
It's not a kludge, and they're not "funny fonts". It's the industry-standard approach for symbols and iconography, particularly because the icons are usually vectorized and thus scale very efficiently to match the resolution of the current "display" with no pixelation or other breakage.

Quote Originally Posted by JRGoold View Post
in Admin, the FontAwesome characters are being displayed by the browser as non-displayable characters (a small rectangle with the two-byte hex(?) code inside it)
It would seem that either you're missing some of the font awesome files from your server, or your admin .htaccess hasn't been updated to allow for the necessary filetypes.