Emojis, utf8:  What is the sugar roadmap?

Support emails are failing to be imported for us due to the new emoji's not being compatible with the limited character set in MySQL.  I have seen several other discussions on the topic with no clear consensus to the best way forward.  Bug 72456 being out there for several years and appears to be stale.  I raised a ticket with Support and received an answer akin to "a partner can help you figure something out."

Okay, so I have been in tough with a partner who is suggesting that we can move to the utf8mb4 charset in mysql.  Realizing that changing character sets on a database can have larger implications, I don't want to proceed only to later be forced to deal with other unintended consequences.

Does the Sugar team have an idea about what direction they are headed with respect to this?  Emoji's aren't going away and i cannot tolerate more missing emails/cases from customers.  Can we get a pseudo-official disposition on the best way to proceed?

Thanks

Dave