Hope this means Apple will have to implement emoji as Tapback replies, if it’s a feature of RCS then it would be weird to have a worse/different implementation for iMessage.

I feel this would be a big mistake, they need to get AI features to as many people as quickly as possible to not look like they are behind and to not look like they are purposefully making old devices obsolete. I know that they like to do on device but if they can’t do that on the last few gens of phones they need to just eat it and do it server side or partially server side until a few years of phones can handle it on device.