You see, adding pictures women with white cane facing right, limes and pregnant men is a very important and time consuming job! Standardizing encoding for some human language people use is just not as important!
Emoji are part of unicode. And people demand more of them, so it's no surprise they put effort into those, even if OP thinks they are not important.Few people appreciate the unicode consortium for their originally intended work.
Very interesting article and background. My father's side of the family is all from Mysuru but also long roots in Udupi and Manipal. I'll ask if anybody are Tulu speakers, I don't think so as I've never heard of it.
They are known, but there are multiple different forms. Some of the forms may have never been seen, and some of them cannot be expressed in the Unicode, as it was made with Latin letters in mind.
So when you're trying to digitize abiguda, you have to be careful about ligatures, because real world may have multiple different forms in different context, and you can get to choose only one. But when we are talking about archiving, it has to be perfectly copy-pasted the way it was in the palm inscription.