@Jain if there's anything that should be done in a database instead of with config files it's emoji management and grouping and that's the One Thing akkoma still does in the filesystem
the misskey approach of uploading them as arbitrary drive files and then linking them is . odd, yes.
to me the solution is to have a file structure much like akkoma's but without the pack.json files dictating what goes where. that should be done in db.
and also you shouldn't need to turn dbconfig on to Access Emoji. they're not even the same thing they're just grouped together in the frontend.