In reply to Jeff Chandler.

Jeff: Funnily enough, I said exactly that 5 years ago when they tried to use the Gnome smilies in 2.9:

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10145#comment:13

IMO, smilies don't belong in core at all. They should be a plugin. But, given that they are in core, it's a bit late to pull them now. But given the adversity to new options, I don't expect that having multiple sets of them in core and an option to choose is a possible course of action..

So, purely as a preventative measure in case the core devs decide to change the smilies, I've moved mine into a plugin to prevent any future breakage from occurring. Even if they change them, it no longer affects me directly: