Emoji were being encoded as characters, as codepoints in private use areas. That inherently called for a Unicode response. Bidirectional support is a headache; the amount of confusion and outright exploits from them is way higher then we like.The HTML support probably doesn't help that. However, properly mixing Hebrew and English (e.g.) is pretty clearly a plain text problem.
There are terabytes of Latin text out there, most of it encoded in formats that already support italics. Whereas emoji, encoded as characters in a then limited number of systems, could be subsumed into Unicode easily, much of that text will never be edited and those formats will never exclude the existing means of marking italics out of bounds, offering multiple ways to do italics in perpetuity. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
