Well, I have to confess that I don't like the smilies either. The smilies that we had with the old board software were much closer to the mood that they were supposed to represent IMO. The current ones just don't fit very well, and as they are supposed to be used to reflect the nuances of speech that are lost with the written word it makes them useless.

I especially don't like the sinister "smiling" smiley - the only people who smile like that are a sandwich short of a picnic.

When you are comdemning someones code and you add the smiley to mean "don't take this too hard, I'm trying to help" it can sometimes look like what you intend is "I'm taking the piss out of your awful programming skills you worthless noob"