Ah, that makes a lot more sense! I thought we had people sitting around talking about what funny picture to put in Unicode next. It's much more understandable if it's something that already exists that's being "ported in".
I think we have that now. The Japanese emoji that have been standardized are kindda culturally skewed, but suddenly became very available world wide and a lot of people around the world want their culture to be represented equally. Hence the whole skin color deal.
And flags. The original japanese emoji set only has 10 country flags (japan, korea, germany, china, USA, france, spain, italy, russia and the UK), the Unicode consortium added 26 REGIONAL INDICATOR symbols used in pairs to encode territorial flags using CLDR region subtags e.g. U+1F1FA REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER U followed by U+ 1F1F8 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S => 馃嚭馃嚫 (USA flag)
Frankly, I much prefer having 26 combining symbols over having to maintain a fixed list of country flags in the Unicode standard. That doesn't solve the problem of maintaining country flags but makes it Somebody Else's Problem, which is fine in my book.
It also lets you have a semi-decent fallback, where you can have some icon for "This was supposed to be the flag for country code XX but we don't know what that looks like."