Decluttering emoji with separate skin tone codepoints

[64-Tesseract]

Due to the sheer number of emoji skin tones (and their combinations with some emojis), it's hard to find a simple emoji like 👍.

You often see in keyboards an option to hide skin tones besides the one you set manually, which makes it very easy to find emojis. If you absolutely have to input specifically a medium-brown ear with hearing aid emoji, they allow you to hold the emoji to open a sub-menu with all its skin tones, but this wouldn't really fit in with the rest of the keyboard.

Instead, my suggestion is to have separate keys for skin tone modifier codepoints (which are technically separate characters but are rendered as a combined single emoji). In my opinion this would suit the "programmer keyboard" vibe well.
I think this could also be done for genderable emojis, but as they have a lot less combinations, clutter is less of an issue.

[GitAlasGo]

Is there a way to change the emoji layout using a custom layout?

[Spike-from-NH]

If you have an emoji of interest, you can copypaste it between double quotes to make it appear on the main keyboard. I have ✔, ✖, and ♪ as swipes. There is no custom layout that governs the emoji layout.