It would help if UIs made it easy to see the name of each emoji. Sometimes I even know what semantics I want but can’t discern which image it’s been assigned to.

On MacOS and iOS/iPadOS, you can search for them by name.

Doesn’t help with “what are they trying to say?”, but does help with your “how do I say FOO?”

when i enter "zen" i get the swearing emoji, not sure why but i love it

This was a much bigger issue 10 years ago than it is now. Emoji are generally fairly consistent across hardware vendors.

I really miss that old Samsung grimace emoji: https://imgur.com/02C8x4i

Or the eye roll one: https://imgur.com/FE664R2

Good times

I just want the gun to be a real gun again

Yes, this is a really large problem that limits their usefulness as a means of communication. I limit myself to the most basic set (and use them sparingly) to avoid misunderstanding.

Yeah I always hesitate to use emojis in any document or design for this reason, you have no idea how it's going to look to other viewers

Case in point: not all vendors implement flags!

Or leave out a handful of flags and render the rest. :)

https://hackertimes.com/item?id=21166519

Imagine if Apple or Google decided to just not render certain words or replace them with a different one. Somehow this is acceptable with emojis.

I'd be ducking outraged

A while back I made a small browser game using emoji for all graphics. I was delighted to see so many different sets of emoji in screenshots people posted.