I completely get the inconvenience here but previously we were inserting a space and moving the caret backwards, it was causing confusion and made for lots of subtle issues.
We certainly like inserting the space, I am uneasy making it so :heart: inserts a space and :+1: does not.
What I think would be best here is to introduce a “background setting” in browser localsettings. Just have the client “remember” which skin tone you selected last and then default to adding it.
Then the fix here is trivial, you change this once here:
And then future emojis you insert will append the skin tone eg 
. I like this so much better cause we are respecting users more. It is very likely you want to keep to the skin tone you just picked.
@codinghorror how does this sound?