Minion 3: Small caps italics?

I have no idea why on earth they would omit the small-cap italic from Minion 3 when Minion Pro has it. I understand the historical background, but in academic works that often have 5 or more levels of head, it's not uncommon to use small caps for the smaller heads, and sometimes, those have italic in them. Yes, I could use italicized "fake" small caps, but if, as is likely, the head is keyed in upper and lower case, I end up with caps and small caps, which I, personally, think is ugly and poor typesetting. Sigh.

I don't get why Adobe does some of the things they do. Another frustrating example is that the font Alegreya available through Google has far more characters that Alegreya available through Creative Cloud. I get that there are licensing restructions, but why offer a limited character set (without any warning) for a font that's already available for free elsewhere?

The regular upright style of Minion 3 Std Regular has 3152 glyphs while the Regular Italic style has 2690 glyphs. The italic style does not have a native small caps character set. This sort of thing is actually somewhat common with text oriented type families. Native small caps character sets will be exclusive to the upright styles while the more "cursive" italic family is confined to using the regular lowercase characters.

You can see the difference by visiting the MyFonts web site, searching Minion 3 and examining the glyphs table for the regular and italic styles there.

Unlike Minion 3, Minion Pro has italic styles that do contain native small capitals. Funny thing: the italic styles of Minion Pro have more glyphs (1864) than the upright styles (1690). But Minion Pro supports fewer languages than Minion 3. By the way, the Minion Variable Concept fonts included in Adobe Illustrator have a more limited character set (no true small capitals is one limitation).