>I've struggled with how I place a smile within parens, without the smiley inadvertently closing out the open paren

My solution is either:

- let the app handle auto-emoji'ing the smiley by doing {smiley} {space} {backspace} {closeparen (or continue on)}

- use a different paired punctuation from parenthesis when I want/need to close multiple levels and/or use smileys