I no longer work on the project but that team is filled with some of the most passionate and dedicated people you could find to shepherd the console from where it was to now. We collectively lived and breathed the console, yet the team was always understaffed and almost always had at least one dev that was pulled off by management to work on what was believed to be a higher priority project.
Implementing the emoji support took me years and that doesn't even count the rendering of them, just the ability to shuttle them through the internals and back. Tabs as well required quite a bit of work behind the scenes, there was an entire blog series written on the work that led up to tabs being possible.