They weren't obnoxious, just subscribed to a more restricted interpretation of "text" than yourself, and to which many people seem to agree.
It's clearly a continuum from 3D objects, to pictures, to icons and ideographs, to highly abstract sings representing words and ultimately sounds. That fact that some designer of character sets decided to put the limit somewhere and include a bird icon and not an Obama icon does not invalidate other interpretations.
By the way, there is a thing called Emojicon where a character for 'Albert Einstein' was proposed as valid 'text'.
