Really?
1. Smilies are that important to you?
2. In my day, we had to type all of the smilies by hand anyway. And they weren't just things like a colon then a parenthesis. There were always square brackets involved.
3. Maybe instead of being mad as hell here on this forum, you could file a bug report with the developer, or casually ask in one of the existing threads about the 68kMLA and classilla if clicking on the smilies/emoticons and having that functionality work is on the roadmap.
4. Heck, maybe it already works, if you asked in one of those threads, you could collaborate with other forum members to figure out why it isn't working with your setup/settings.