Disclaimer: I personally do not need emoji's.

Does TheLounge let users upload custom emoji? I ask, because my coworkers say, "You can take Slack from my cold dead hands". There was even a great emoji war.

I would like to stand up a web interface to IRC and let folks play around on it. I tried Convos, but it didn't seem to fit that piece of the puzzle.

For the backend, I have always used UnrealIRCD + Anope services. It has always been rock solid and scales beyond any need I could imagine. It would be great if there were a modern web interface I could put in front of it that people would want to use.