The reason for the discrepancy is that when the addresses table is first created, it is created with a table-wide default encoding of latin1, since it does not need to contain any Unicode data. The dbdelta() function that WordPress provides does not handle encodings, and therefore I have some manual alter table queries in there to ensure that some columns do not generate indexes that are too large for some old versions of MySQL. The encoding for enum types is not really important, as the possible values are enumerated and therefore take up fixed space when indexed.
Bottom line is, I am currently unable to verify that changing to a different encoding would solve a reproducible issue.
But if another encoding or collation works for you, then go ahead and use it. You should not have any problems doing so.
kind regards