> No more trash than any other.
This isn't accurate. Writing systems excluding emoji are used to communicate linguistically. Emoji are not a linguistic phenomenon; they have semantics, but they have no syntax or pronunciation. That's why there's so much anxiety about the image a recipient sees matching the image you sent -- nobody cares if they send a message in one font and the recipient views it in a different font, because there is agreement on what an A is, what an f is, etc.
Compare the traditional Chinese character for "come", 來. This is a picture of a stalk of wheat, but people wanted to talk about coming, and they borrowed a word that sounded the same so they could write it down. "Wheat" was originally written this way too, but the concept of coming was so common that "wheat" was driven to a different character, 麥. This all works because the characters are being used to write a language rather than to free-associate based on some pictures which have no specified relationship to each other or anything else. Emoji do not fit in Unicode because they are not part of a writing system. They're a hack for sending image data without having to send the full image over the wire.
All languages are completely dependent on a set of words that have no semantic value at all, like the English word "of". Emoji do not support these, and if they did, they wouldn't be emoji.
I agree regarding the Unicode Consortium, the reason I have that under "good news" is that the publication tools we have now are immensely better than what there was in the past, and we can overcome the limitations of reliance on anyone using existing tools. Even though there is a cost, the cost is lower than ever.
No more trash than any other.
Plus... I'm amused at your use of "trash" in that way, given your horror of signifiers changing significance.
> There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.
... the whole point of having a writing system is having a standard writing system, at least de facto, and without the Unicode Consortium, there would be some other standards body because that's how computer software works. That other standards body would be worse than the Unicode Consortium by virtue of not being the Unicode Consortium, and therefore being either irrelevant or an agent which destroys cross-platform compatibility.