Upstream GNU Emacs can no more be called "crippled" on macOS than it can be called "crippled" on linux, because on neither does it support multi-color emoticons. Maybe it seems "unfair" because macOS users
could easily have the feature advantage over a free/libre OS user, but upstream GNU Emacs denies macOS the advantage.
It is kind of funny. But also funny because GNU's adherence to their licensing philosophy means it's just as easy for you to get the full macOS-enhanced fork. So the angst seems unreasonable to me.
(Also, the whole emoticon trend is pretty annoying, from an implementation perspective. First it was just B/W icons, fine. But then users wanted color, and now fonts have to do something they've never done before, embed multiple colors for a glyph. There were multiple proposals for font formats to do this, IIRC Microsoft proposed a new TrueType table with color references, and Mozilla proposed just stuffing most of SVG into OpenType, I didn't follow this story to the end. Fonts were already pretty complicated and prone to vulnerabilities, and this more than doubles that complication. But it gets better, now that there's color and high detail, in this brave new politically correct world we need to be able to have a range of skin tones and genders for all emoticons with a person in them! Now we need color and gender "zero-width" modifiers, multiple for small groups! More than double the complexity again! Can't we just go back to B/W symbols and let people use PNG/JPG/SVG if they want an arbitrary fucking picture?)
It is kind of funny. But also funny because GNU's adherence to their licensing philosophy means it's just as easy for you to get the full macOS-enhanced fork. So the angst seems unreasonable to me.
(Also, the whole emoticon trend is pretty annoying, from an implementation perspective. First it was just B/W icons, fine. But then users wanted color, and now fonts have to do something they've never done before, embed multiple colors for a glyph. There were multiple proposals for font formats to do this, IIRC Microsoft proposed a new TrueType table with color references, and Mozilla proposed just stuffing most of SVG into OpenType, I didn't follow this story to the end. Fonts were already pretty complicated and prone to vulnerabilities, and this more than doubles that complication. But it gets better, now that there's color and high detail, in this brave new politically correct world we need to be able to have a range of skin tones and genders for all emoticons with a person in them! Now we need color and gender "zero-width" modifiers, multiple for small groups! More than double the complexity again! Can't we just go back to B/W symbols and let people use PNG/JPG/SVG if they want an arbitrary fucking picture?)