The point of modern emoji is that their look is standardized though. (past the original goal of Japanese cell phone communication, the consortium seems to be concerned with filling in gaps and making sure cultures are properly represented) So emoji should (ideally) be a common set of pictograms that people can send to each other and which can be displayed interchangeable by each IME. The Unicode Consortium also has more stringent standards for inclusion. [0] UI icons are excluded. 2.6K isn't a lot, [1] Unicode has tons of room, and no one is forcing you to use them. People have obviously found use for them and it has made them enthusiastic about interacting with their tech overlords. [2] I used to irrationally hate anything popular too, until I made an effort to try to understands people's motivations for liking it and tried it myself. Emoji are the missing expressive layer of our text that express nuance like sarcasm and mirth. Sure we have emoticons, but those were limited and emoji are much more diverse and versatile. [3] Maybe you should give them a try before being so quick to write them off. I don't exactly pepper my texts with them, but I do respect people's motivations for using them and I always make sure to send a popper [4] to my friends on their birthdays.
[0]: http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html
[1]: Just look at how many Chinese characters there are...
[2]: Campaigns to get certain emoji into unicode are quite popular, such as with the taco emoji (https://www.tacobell.com/feed/tacoemoji) and the dumping emoji (http://www.dumplingemoji.org/).
[3]: Eggplant emoji anyone?
[4]: http://emojipedia.org/party-popper/