🧔 Justin
I think enforcing them in the status field would at least alleviate the problem of your eyes focusing on them before anything else (slightly), but then you run into the issue of emojis with brighter colors having the doggy advantage. But there's no post scoring, so who cares!
🗿 Simohamed
I think they work well for distinguishing users at a glance. HN suffers from this where you often have to read a user's username to know if they're OP.