There may have been versions of the spec after I last red it, but for sure when I read it there were no colors in fonts. Adding color would be non-trivial, but not in the dramatic sense of non-trivial, but in the more literal sense. Not super hard, but for sure not super easy.
I expect the originals were to trashed, but exist in some design consultants “work product, not surrendered” folder for the job to save time if they are hired to do another spin of the same sort of thing. Or in an employee’s home directory (I recall seeing someone here saying they worked for a consulting company that did emojis…but I also remember someone saying they did about 40% of the emoji’s as an Apple intern and their boss did the rest…no reason both stories can’t be true though, likely about different generations of the emoji “font”). Even if that employee is gone I believe Apple keeps backups for a very long time. Well, if that machine/directory was backed at all (IS&T at Apple has some weird behaviors, as might be expected of a company where many people run unfinished new versions of an OS basically “at or near head” on a daily basis)
