This is a similar situation to how Lucid decided to implement the Blave and Muskratte character art palettes while leaving the original, perfectly fine character icons available yet not the first option. The original ones had nothing wrong with them yet Lucid felt the need to put two completely different icon types in just to have something new.
Now, regardless of your opinions on the respective character icon art types previously mentioned, I think that everyone who actually wants to keep the old icons or replace them would be satisfied if we implemented a system similar to the one in which we change the character icons from Blave/Muskratte/Original icons with the emoticons. This way people won't have to complain about losing old emoticons or getting new emoticons that they didn't even want in the first place, or being forced to do what the majority wanted yet they did not.
So basically make emoticon sets selectable between the higher vote getters and maybe even all of the sets. It'll make everyone happy.
This is what I was talking about earlier, the system will work similarly.
This is a similar situation to how Lucid decided to implement the Blave and Muskratte character art palettes while leaving the original, perfectly fine character icons available yet not the first option. The original ones had nothing wrong with them yet Lucid felt the need to put two completely different icon types in just to have something new.
Now, regardless of your opinions on the respective character icon art types previously mentioned, I think that everyone who actually wants to keep the old icons or replace them would be satisfied if we implemented a system similar to the one in which we change the character icons from Blave/Muskratte/Original icons with the emoticons. This way people won't have to complain about losing old emoticons or getting new emoticons that they didn't even want in the first place, or being forced to do what the majority wanted yet they did not.
So basically make emoticon sets selectable between the higher vote getters and maybe even all of the sets. It'll make everyone happy.