There is no plan or ability to go back to the old "smilies". We are keeping things in their standards as much as possible. And the forum software doesn't come with animated emojis.
However, I suggest using the first row in the smilies dialog, Recently used. It makes things very easy.
(Honestly, I mostly type what I need and save the extra clicks on the emoji button, but also regularly use the Recently used list)
Also, the search box helps me finding a possible emoji that I don't even know if there is one for the word that I am searching for.
I am living with my phone, tablet, and computers at the same time during the day, and having the same/compatible emojis makes me feel good. And I would never know if I will ever use one particular emoji, when, or never, but it is good to know they are accessible if I ever need one.
The final note about this: it is also not something we can to reduce the emoji count in the list without customization that we mostly try to avoid unless it is something vital (like recovering and transferring the Like statistics that were lost in the old forum software years ago. It was not supported by the new forum software, transferring them, but we applied the necessary customization during the migration last year and it worked well). So, we keep things as designed as much as possible which helps avoiding any complications during the software upgrades.
