To make it clear: There is a semantic difference because superscripting makes it an annotation. Simply writing “Unicode®” with the circle on the baseline seems wrong to me because it is like writing “UnicodeReg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off.”.
Another discrepancy that I noticed concerns the hourglass emojis. Originally, there was just one (⌛, U+231B). The reference glyph shows all of the sand below, in some designs, however, the sand is still flowing. Now that we have U+23F3 (⏳, hourglass with flowing sand), it would make sense that U+231B is shown without flowing sand; in some designs, however, this is not the case (perhaps to remain consistent with how it was before) and U+23F3 has a greater proportion of the sand at the top.
