The thing that frustrates me the most about Unicode emoji is the astounding number of combining characters. For combining characters in written languages, you can do an NFC normalization and, with moderate success, get a 1 codepoint = 1 grapheme mapping, but "Emoji 2.0" introduced some ridiculous emoji compositions with the ZWJ character. To use the author's example: woman - 1 codepoint black woman - 2 codepoints, w…
Man, imagine if you could compose chinese characters out of radicals like this. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.
There is active discussion on actually being able to build up complex grapheme clusters in such a manner, because it's necessary for Egyptian and Mayan text to be displayed properly. U+13430 and U+13431 have been accepted for Unicode 10.0 already for some Egyptian quadrat construction.