I kid you not there's not a fucking >:) emoji HOW DID THEY MISS THAT ITS SO BASIC

Where did they go... >>

They can't even capture the subtlety of :p versus :P it never looks right because it removes the imaginative component

At text sizes I'm comfortable with, emoji almost always render too small. It's easy for me to tell :) from :( but 🙂 and 🙁 are yellow circles. To tell them apart I have to lean forward.

Or you get into the noun ones that aren't facial expressions, people use wrong. There's an entire group of pictograms but they're added redundantly to words. So you don't get "I stuck a 🌵 up my 🍆" you get "I stuck a cactus 🌵 up my dick 🍆" for no reason I can think of.

Combine that with the fact that...I nearly never open the emoji drawer and find an expression that conveys the actual expression I want, and yeah emoji were a mistake.

Can't you just do the old school ones anyway? There's an issue with simple ones like :) where it gets auto-replaced but the more exotic ones should be fine.