What kind of work do you do?
I'd say this project is much better than your words suggest. It's full of interesting technical problems unique to the domain of animation. That's way more fun than writing a standard CRUD Ruby on Rails web app, at least in my opinion.
And hey, some people are janitors and garbage men/women. Any job in engineering beats that.
In what sense? Usefulness to society? Comfort? Pay? I'd argue that the janitors and garbagemen are doing much more of a public good than the proportion of software "engineering" that goes into a social media application, despite any technical smartness behind it.
But I too find animated icons REALLY annoying and would have preferred if they were opt-in.
In fact I send : ) instead of :-) on Skype because I feel the smileys makes me look like an annoying kid.
Just take it as a proof of concept - it animates emojis today, but it can be useful for some other "useful" things in the future.