On the other hand, quite a lot dev time is spent in total on the whole emoji skin tone modifiers. How much dev time is it worth it to make that one person feel more welcome, and wouldn't there be other areas where this time would be better spent to make people feel more welcome?
The engineering efforts required to standardize emoji skin tone modifiers are certainly applicable to other use cases. Do you really think it's a complete waste of time?
To be honest ... I kind of do. It's not that I don't think the goals are a waste of time, those are great, but it always seemed to me that the much simpler approach of a yellow skin tone solved the same problem in a much simpler way. Similarly with the gender modifiers, a gender-neutral depiction always seemed like the better option to me.
