[AlanYx]

I agree that Han unification was an unfortunate design decision, but I'd argue that the consortium is following a consistent approach to the Han unification with emoji. For example, they treat "regional" vendor variations in emoji as a font issue. If you get a message with the gun emoji, unless you have out-of-band information regarding which vendor variant is intended, there's no way in software to know if it should be displayed as a water gun (Apple "regional" variant) or a weapon (other vendor variants). Which is not that different from a common problem stemming from Han unification.

[emodendroket]

I don't disagree, but my point is more than their concern was about having "too many characters" in Unicode, which no longer seems to be a real concern, so what would be the harm of adding national variants?

[account42]

Have skin tone variants (which is somethine Unicode chose to add rather than added because of existing use) is consistent with not have distinct variants for glyphs from different languages?