That sounds cool too! I guess with individual glyphs you have more freedom to try out unique combinations the font maker might not have thought of (that's how the traditional smiley was born, after all :P) but there's probably a bigger potential to make professional-looking symbols if they're handmade because you can make sure they look good. Decisions, decisions... actually, you could always include the radicals used to build the dingbats as separate characters to bump up the character count without additional effort :P (Assuming you make stuff like "=w=" which makes sense to break up like that, of course)