The Invision ones are quite nice, I use a variant on theirs. The vBulletin ones are absolutely awful in my eyes. And in most other's eyes too as far as my experience goes, but vBulletin isn't terribly strong graphically in general I don't think.

Invision's smilies are too big and I don't like to mix them with vBulletin's.

I agree that smiley is annoying and it especially annoys me as a post icon.

On my forum's smilies I put a toothless smiley in place of the default big grin, because I thought that toothless smilies were beautiful too and should not be discriminated against or considered any less beautiful.
http://www.3-3-3.org/forum/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

Here's an idea.

Submit new smilies at vbulletin.com and hopefully they'll use it on the new 3.6.9 in the future :D

Its not that easy, smilies are copyrighted stuff.

Btw a smilie like this https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/ I feel would be much more appropriate for the shortcut :D

It'll belong to vBulletin if they accept it.

And as we all know they will not :p

Nothing wrong with the default vbulletin emoticon. It's one part of vbulletin I quite like. Considering the size of the emoticons they convey the range of emotions quite well, bare in mind being static makes it harder to convey that emotion.

the only emoticon that looks out of place is this one >> :erm:

I hate the default vB3 emoticons..

Like someone else, they're usually the first thing that gets replaced when I set up a message board. I'd rather use pixelated stuff than those, and the ones that vB.org used to use were great - I even bought a license from the designer to use them myself..