In reply to Drew Jaynes.

Drew, maybe you are confusing two related things that are related only because they were "sold" together. I want to believe that no one complains about the change in the encoding of the table, the complains are toward the shim that is the worst type of hack, it relies on an non standard quirk and unsurprisingly proved to be both unreliable and buggy. It tries to implement something that a browser (chrom) do not support which is stupid unless core want to start contribute to browser development as well.

For years web developers were having a really bad time supporting IE6 and core never suggested to, for example, autoload some JS to solve alpha channel problems with PNG images, so if there was a change in policy maybe core should include more useful polifills that people actually care about.
If the policy was that core includes polifills then another one to support imoji would have been less of an issue, but selecting to support polifill no one wants but no other? I don't think anyone can actually figure out the reason for that which is probably part of the reason people keep ranting about it.