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.
