Unfortunately, it is a non-trivial amount of work (UBB has a rather tricky code base). But we'll make a note to ourselves for any software we might migrate to.
As a workaround, you can turn off smilies for individual posts by unchecking a checkbox during posting. Certain forums (like
JDBC, I think) have this checkbox turned off by default. We could turn it off for other forums as well, if there are particular ones where you're seeing a lot of this.