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.
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?
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?
