The issue doesn't really seem to be the emojis, but rather the variation sequences, which seem to be really awkward to work with, but I can sort of see why they're necessary. But the fact that we need special libraries to answer fairly basic queries about unicode text doesn't bode well.
> But the fact that we need special libraries to answer fairly basic queries about unicode text doesn't bode well.
That's always been needed to actually properly work with unicode, what do you think ICU is? Few if any languages have complete native Unicode support. And it's hardly new, Unicode has an annex (#29) dedicated to text segmentation: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/
