Revert "Call safe_encode() instead of str()"

This reverts commit df44a7e25d47329fd863a5830b053c1cc3a0251f.

Not only did it not account for the object versioning changes
required, or all the other string attributes we have, but the
unicode "fix" was backwards anyway (we should be decoding, not
encoding there).

Change-Id: I2369a79944fa5cb3b076e09a92f5075ec3427f46
Merge "Revert "Call safe_encode() instead of str()""