In reply to Otto.

We weren't expecting such a rush on smilies complaints. Have a donut. (I ordered vegetarian.)

I will say... I hate the existing ones, and always have. First reason I learned to code in WP? Get rid of them (admittedly, my code was an .htaccess redirect, but the filter didn't exist yet!). I do get Otto's point about 'Leave my content alone' and it's a solid, good, fair point. But so is the fact that it's bloody 2014, and the tiny, pixelated, smilies aren't easy for everyone to read, they look like crap when you zoom in a page to 120% (which I find myself doing on sites with 12px fonts), and if we can have smilie 'packs' all handled by a plugin and yank 'em from core 'safely' (like we did with link manager), then that would be nice.

Hell, I'd be happy if we could have scalable versions that look JUST LIKE the ones today. That would be far less objectionable to me than the gifs.