Also, I wonder whether there might be some people who are simply more used to just typing out :) for the commonly used smileys because that's how they'd have to do it in other mediums like IRC.
Those people are also used to their smileys being seen as written. :)
Isn't that more about the client software they may be using? I imagine some IRC clients may have the feature to automatically convert common smiley encodings into graphics exactly like what the forum is doing to posts. On the flip side, historically speaking we know that :
) was used precisely because it was the only way at the time to display the smiley, rather than being an expressed desire to show off ASCII art.
Also, while I mentioned IRC, it may also be worth considering the case of people using other SMF and similar forums. I could be wrong but I presume on most such forums, the settings are left at the defaults in which the common encodings are recognized and automatically displayed as graphics.
I will concede the point though that ultimately this (ie. what to do with common smiley encodings) involves what is essentially a user preference setting, one which doesn't currently exist from what I can tell. (There is one that applies to the post itself, but it must be set on a post-by-post fashion and cannot be applied on a finer granularity.) Maybe namida is onto something when he proposed we modified the forum software?
Anyhow, since the new smileys are now available, as far as I care my work is done. The rest can be taken care of by others.