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Good question. Maybe this handshake work paves the way to make other emoji more representative too! I bet you could reach out to the author and get involved with making that change.

I wonder if that emoji could procedurally be generated on the client without officially deploying every combination to the standard.

Male child + Yellow + ZWJ + Gender Neutral child + Yellow + ZWJ + ...

And then it builds up the family emoji from the inside out.

I believe you mean child + male + ZWJ + child + ZWJ ...

I think it was mostly a mistake that the joiners started occurring later. Expressed eloquently in https://xkcd.com/1813/

This was proposed: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19392-emoji-multi-recs.pdf

And declined to make RGI: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20114r-family-emoji-explor....

The same multi-tone scheme would generate more than 10,000 combinations for the family emoji. I wonder if it will ever be seriously considered.

Yeah, the family emoji are a mistake of sorts. Fortunately, individual emoji strung together convey the idea of a "mixed family" with three kids and require no effort on Unicode's part to add new emoji. Ex: